Geo-hierarchy methodology

The geographic hierarchy is the way by which Xeneta organizes ocean freight ports across the world into regional groupings based on their proximity and rate similarity.

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To review our entire geo-hierarchy for ocean freight ports, use our interactive diagram or download it in Excel.

How we group ports

Xeneta organizes individual ports into groups based on shared properties. Some groups are based on geographic proximity, while others are based on both proximity and price correlation.

An individual port is at the lowest level of the geo-hierarchy, while the highest level is the continent that contains said port.

For example, the geographical hierarchy for the port of Oslo (NOOSL) in Xeneta looks like this:

World → Europe → Northern Europe → Scandinavia → Norway South East → Oslo (NOOSL)

When searching for rates, Xeneta always attempts to find direct contracted rates for your selected origin and destination pair.

If Xeneta can't find rates at the lower level in the geo-hierarchy, it will move one level up and attempt to find rates for a larger area. If it cannot find rates at the new level, it will continue to move further up until it reaches a geographic level where it can provide a valid rate, or until it exhausts all available options and returns no results.

As Xeneta moves up the geo-hierarchy, it considers larger and larger regions, and as a result it loses precision for its aggregated rates in favor of being able to provide any rate:

Contracted and regional rates

Xeneta can display two types of rates in Market benchmarks — contracted rates or regional rates.

• Contracted rates are aggregated contract rates between two specific ports
• Regional rates are aggregated rates between larger regions when exact port-to-port rates are not available

Geo-hierarchy breakdown example

In this example, we'll be looking at the Oslo–Hamburg trade lane.

We can illustrate both ports using the geo-hierarchy approach — with the individual port at the bottom, followed by increasing regional scope with each step up, until the scope reaches the continent level:

Both ports are situated in the Northern Europe region, but diverge into distinct regions (Scandinavia and North Europe Main) as we go one level up.

One level up

By default, Xeneta will first look for contracted rates directly between Oslo and Hamburg. If there's not enough rate data to show the contracted rate between Oslo and Hamburg, it will proceed to move one step up the geo-hierarchy.

The system can move up the hierarchy for either the origin or the destination, depending on data availability at the time of request.

One step up the geo-hierarchy will expand the potential candidates for regional rates to the Norway South East and North Europe Main regions. This will allow Xeneta to look at the following regions to provide a regional rate:

• Oslo – North Europe Main
• Norway South East — Hamburg

Two levels up

If a single step up the geo-hierarchy doesn't yield enough data to reliably show a regional rate, the system will go two steps up the geo-hierarchy. This will expand potential candidates for a regional rate all the way up to the Scandinavia and Northern Europe regions.

As before, the system will be able to take two steps up the geo-hierarchy across both the origin and the destination, meaning that Xeneta will look at the following regions in order to provide a regional rate:

• Norway South East – North Europe Main
• Oslo – Northern Europe
• Scandinavia – Hamburg

This process will continue until Xeneta finds a level in the geo-hierarchy that can provide a valid freight rate or until it determines that it doesn't have enough data.

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Xeneta does its best to always provide a contracted rate by default, but it will offer a regional rate if no contracted rates are available in the system for the selected origin-destination pair.