When the Strait of Hormuz was confirmed closed on March 2, 2026, Vizion's booking data registered the shock in the same week, in both directions. Bookings into the Gulf's container ports and bookings out of them both fell off together. What has happened since is the more useful story: the two sides have moved to completely different places, and the split is visible port by port.

A note on the data. These are container bookings, not vessel transits, which is why they move early. Origin bookings are exports leaving a port; destination bookings are imports arriving at it. This piece reads both. It is the port-level companion to our country-level view of the same disruption.

The split: imports are climbing back, exports are not

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Indexed to their early-February average, imports and exports at the three Gulf ports with clean data on both sides, Jebel Ali, Khalifa, and Dammam, told the same story until March, then diverged. Both collapsed to roughly a tenth of normal in the first weeks after the closure. Imports then began climbing and now sit near 35% of their pre-closure level. Exports never moved off the floor and sit near 11%.

Jebel Ali is the clearest case. Its import bookings fell from about 24,700 per week to a low of 3,084 in week 11, then recovered to roughly 11,400 per week by June, close to half of normal. Its export bookings fell from about 10,900 per week to roughly 1,200 and have stayed there. Same port, same closure, opposite trajectories.

Where each port stands now

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Measured against the early-February baseline, this is the current standing:

Two patterns stand out. Dammam, on Saudi Arabia's Gulf coast, is near zero on both sides and has not recovered. Jeddah, on the Red Sea, grew on both sides, and its import bookings more than doubled. The Gulf ports that depend on Hormuz went quiet; the Red Sea gateway absorbed the region's trade.

Imports found the Red Sea door

The reason imports recovered is that the region's inbound trade found another way in. As inbound bookings collapsed at the Gulf ports, they climbed at the Red Sea. The Gulf ports lost roughly 25,000 inbound bookings per week against their baseline. Jeddah gained close to 16,000 per week over the same period, with smaller additions at King Abdullah and Sohar, accounting for about 69% of the lost Gulf inbound volume.

That is a regional read, not a clean port-to-port swap. Some of Jeddah's rise is Saudi restocking after the spring supply gap, and goods bound for the UAE do not simply reappear at a Saudi port. Salalah's inbound also more than tripled, but that traces to Cape-of-Good-Hope transshipment tied to Red Sea avoidance, a separate disruption, so it is left out of the count here. Even with those caveats, the shape is unambiguous: imports to the region largely kept flowing, through the Red Sea instead of Hormuz.

Exports never found one

The export side has no equivalent. Of the roughly 21,800 export bookings per week the Gulf ports lost, only about 5,500 reappear anywhere in the data, almost all of it at Jeddah as Saudi Arabia shifted export volume west across its land bridge. That is about a quarter. The remaining three-quarters does not show up at any port in this dataset.

It is worth being precise about what that means. It is a statement about visibility, not a claim that the cargo was destroyed. The missing export volume could be stranded in the Gulf, re-sourced from origins outside the region entirely, or moving through ports this dataset does not cover, including Fujairah, the UAE's only container port outside the strait. Fujairah is not in this data. It is a modest container facility built mainly around oil storage and bunkering, and it was struck directly during the March attacks on the emirates, so it is an unlikely home for the bulk of the missing volume, but the booking record cannot close that question on its own.

Why the two sides diverge

The split has a plausible logic, offered as a read rather than a proof. Imports answer demand. The region still needs goods, so importers reroute to whatever door is open and keep ordering. Exports answer supply and standing contracts. Re-establishing export flows means rebuilding carrier slot agreements, repositioning empty equipment, and restarting production decisions that were disrupted for months, which takes longer than redirecting an inbound booking. The booking data shows the demand side adapting quickly and the supply side still stalled.

The control, and the timeline

Two checks support reading this as Hormuz-specific. Israel's Mediterranean ports, Haifa and Ashdod, kept running throughout, so this is not a region-wide shipping collapse. And the timing tracks the conflict: the break lands in week 10, the week of the closure; a partial rebound appears in weeks 13 to 15 around the late-March signals and the April 8 ceasefire; and the strait re-closing on April 18 and 19 shows up as a renewed drop.

Why this shows up in bookings first

Customs records confirm what already sailed. Booking signals show what shippers are committing to now, which is why the closure registered here the same week it happened, and why the import recovery and the export stall are visible now rather than after the customs record catches up. For anyone managing Gulf exposure, that lead time is the difference between reacting to the shift and positioning for it.

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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