If you work in freight forwarding, you probably have MarineTraffic open in a browser tab right now. You check it in the morning, after lunch, before you leave the office, and sometimes on your phone in the evening. It's become part of the job — a repetitive, time-consuming habit that takes you away from higher value work.
But it doesn't have to be this way.
The problem with manual tracking
MarineTraffic is a great tool — it gives you live AIS data for vessels around the world. But it's a passive tool. It shows you information when you ask for it. It doesn't come to you.
That means every freight forwarder using it is essentially doing the same thing: repeatedly checking the same vessels, looking for a change that may or may not have happened. It's the maritime equivalent of refreshing your email every five minutes waiting for a reply.
The inefficiency compounds when you're managing multiple shipments. Ten vessels across five different ports means ten separate checks every time you want an update. For a busy forwarding operation, that adds up to hours of unproductive time every week.
A better approach: automated alerts
The solution is to flip the model. Instead of you going to check on vessels, have the system come to you when something happens.
Automated vessel arrival alerts work by continuously monitoring a vessel's AIS position and sending you an email the moment it arrives at your target port. You set it up once and forget about it — the monitoring happens in the background, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
What this looks like in practice
With Portool, the process is straightforward:
- Add the vessel using its IMO or MMSI number
- Enter the target port UN/LOCODE
- Choose your alert preferences — arrival, departure, or delay
- Walk away
From that point, Portool checks the vessel's position every 20 minutes using live AIS data. When it detects an arrival at your target port, it sends you an instant email. No logging in. No manual checking. No missed arrivals overnight.
The time saving
If you check MarineTraffic three times a day for ten vessels, that's thirty individual lookups per day. At two minutes each, that's an hour of your time every single day — just checking. Over a working month, that's roughly twenty hours spent on a task that could be fully automated.
Automated vessel alerts give you that time back.
Set up your first vessel alert in under two minutes.
Start your free trial →