When the Strait of Hormuz closed in March, export bookings out of the Gulf's container ports collapsed within weeks and then stayed down, pinned near a tenth of their pre-closure level through the spring. For a full quarter the export side of the region's trade showed no route out.

The new booking data shows that has changed. And the timing is the least intuitive part: the recovery did not come with the strait's brief reopening in June. It began after the strait closed for the second time, and it has accelerated since.

A note on the data. These are origin bookings, the export side: containers booked to leave each port. The series is monthly, January through September 2026, with September a partial month treated as directional only. All figures are indexed to the January to February average, the last normal period before the closure. (For the import side of this disruption, see our earlier port-level read.)

The floor finally gave

Export bookings out of Jebel Ali collapsed from roughly 46,000 per month before the closure to under 4,000 in April, and stayed near that floor through June. Then July bookings roughly doubled to just under 11,000, held there in August, and the partial September count is tracking higher still. Khalifa followed the same shape, reaching about 36 percent of its baseline in August.

Dammam is the more dramatic case. Saudi Arabia's Gulf-coast port was functionally dead by June, 269 export bookings for the entire month against a baseline near 9,900. In August it booked over 6,000, about 61 percent of normal. A port that had flatlined for a full quarter came most of the way back in eight weeks.

Jubail is the exception. After a brief flicker in July it fell back to a few percent of baseline, and it remains the one Gulf port in this data with no recovery to speak of.

The timing is the story

Here is why the timing matters. On June 17 the US and Iran signed a memorandum providing toll-free passage through the strait, and it held for roughly three weeks before breaking down in early July after renewed attacks on commercial shipping. Since then the strait has stayed effectively closed, with transit counts through September still a fraction of pre-crisis levels.

Export bookings barely moved during the reopening window itself. Jebel Ali's June total was flat against May, and Dammam's fell. The climb came in July, held through August, and is tracking higher in the partial September count, all with the strait shut. Whatever is carrying this recovery, it is not the reopening. Shippers began committing export volume after the door officially closed again.

What could explain a recovery through a closed strait

We offer this as a read, not a proof, because booking data records the commitment to ship, not the route or the terms. But the shape of the recovery matches what has emerged in the strait since July: a managed-passage environment rather than a total stop. Reporting since August describes vessels transiting under a toll regime administered from the Iranian side, others running an unauthorized southern corridor through Omani waters, and a blacklist published for ships that do neither. Passage is constrained, priced, and risky. It is no longer zero.

The Omani ports in this data are consistent with a second mechanism. Export bookings at Salalah ran at more than twice their baseline in July and August, with Sohar and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah Port also well above normal. Some Gulf cargo appears to be reaching deep-water services by relay, moving to ports outside the strait and loading there. Between paid passage and relay routing, shippers seem to have concluded they can commit to export bookings again, five months after they stopped.

Where each port stands

Measured against the January to February baseline, August draws a clean line through the region. Every port inside the strait is still down, from Dammam's minus 39 percent to Jubail's minus 97. Every port outside it on the relay and Red Sea routes is up, from Sohar's plus 34 percent to Salalah's plus 138. The geography of the closure is the whole story: what matters is not which country a port is in but which side of Hormuz it sits on.

Jeddah has not cracked

Jeddah, on the Red Sea and outside the strait entirely, is running the opposite experiment. Its export bookings jumped to roughly 2.4 times baseline in March, the same month the strait closed, as Saudi Arabia pushed export volume west across its land bridge, and it has stayed far above it every month since, running near double baseline through the summer.

That resilience is now the thing to watch rather than assume. In late July, Houthi forces declared a blockade on shipping associated with Saudi ports at the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and in September they took direct control of the Yemeni side of the strait for the first time. The route carrying the largest share of the region's rerouted trade now has its own chokepoint risk. As of this data, through a partial September, Jeddah's export bookings show no break. If that changes, it will show up here first.

The controls

Israel's Mediterranean ports, Haifa and Ashdod, ran at or above their baselines throughout, with the smaller Haifa Bayport dipping modestly below in some months, nothing resembling the Gulf's collapse. The pattern here is not a regional shipping downturn. And the inflection points track the conflict timeline: the March collapse with the closure, the flat spring under full closure, and the sustained climb beginning in July as the managed-passage environment took shape.

What the booking signal is saying

Customs records will confirm this recovery months from now. The booking data shows it as it forms: exporters in the Gulf are committing volume again, under a strait that is still officially closed, and the region's trade is reorganizing around tolls, relays, and a Red Sea gateway that is itself under threat. For anyone with Gulf exposure, the question has shifted from whether exports come back to how durable the routes they are coming back on will prove.

TradeView tracks origin and destination booking signals across global ports in near real time. See how TradeView reads disruptions as they form.

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