Demurrage is one of the most frustrating costs in freight forwarding. You've done everything right — booked the haulage, arranged the customs clearance, prepared the documentation — and then the vessel arrives overnight while you're asleep, and by the time you find out the next morning, the clock has already been ticking.
For many small freight forwarders, demurrage charges of £500 to £2,000 per container per day are not uncommon. And the root cause is almost always the same: finding out about a vessel arrival too late.
Why freight forwarders miss arrivals
The problem isn't laziness or carelessness — it's that manual vessel tracking simply doesn't scale. A busy freight forwarder might be managing ten or twenty active shipments at once, each on a different vessel heading to a different port. Checking MarineTraffic for each one multiple times a day is time-consuming, repetitive, and easy to forget.
Vessels also don't respect business hours. A container ship can berth at Felixstowe at 3am on a Sunday, and without 24/7 monitoring, you won't know until Monday morning — by which point demurrage has already started accruing.
How vessel arrival alerts change the equation
The solution is straightforward: instead of manually checking vessel positions, let an automated system watch them for you and send you an email the moment a vessel arrives.
With a tool like Portool, you add a vessel once — entering the IMO or MMSI number and the target port — and from that point on the system monitors the vessel's AIS position every 20 minutes, 24 hours a day. The moment it detects an arrival at your target port, it sends you an instant email alert.
That means:
- No more manually checking MarineTraffic multiple times a day
- Instant notification the moment a vessel berths — even at 3am
- Time to arrange haulage, customs clearance and documentation before demurrage starts
- Peace of mind that nothing will slip through the cracks
The cost of doing nothing
Consider a freight forwarder managing 10 active shipments per month. If even one results in a demurrage charge of £1,000 due to a missed arrival, that's £12,000 per year in avoidable costs. Against that, a vessel tracking tool that costs £19-49 per month is a negligible expense.
The real cost of manual tracking isn't just the demurrage charges — it's also the time spent checking, the stress of uncertainty, and the operational disruption when something is missed.
Getting started
Setting up vessel arrival alerts with Portool takes under two minutes per vessel. You need the vessel's IMO or MMSI number (available on MarineTraffic) and the UN/LOCODE for the destination port. From there, Portool does the monitoring automatically.
A 14-day free trial is available with no credit card required — enough time to track several real shipments and see the difference automated alerts make to your operations.
Stop manually checking vessel positions.
Start your free trial →