The Sailing Schedules search functionality in the Portcast platform gives you access to the scheduled sailings for all major carriers between port pairs, empowering you to make the best choices during your planning operations.

It is an easy to use dashboard, that can also be integrated into your own platform in a granular and flexible fashion. It also includes integration with Portcast's Port Congestion data, giving you visibility into possible congestion-related risks for the ports on your voyage of interest.

What are Sailing Schedules?

The concept of sailing schedules in the maritime shipping industry refers to all planned voyages that a carrier publishes as planned, allowing for bookings to be made on those sailings. This is akin to reading a train timetable - including the fact that these scheduled sailings can include intermediate ports on the way to a port of interest. The carriers will also communicate on additional information, such as:

• Estimated Time of Departure and Arrival (ETD/ETA) for all ports, including Port of Loading (POL), Port of Discharge (POD), and intermediate ports where the vessel is scheduled to call into
• Duration of each leg of the voyage
• The carrier company that will be performing the scheduled sailing
• Vessels that will be performing the voyages. This can be a single vessel (in the case of direct voyages) or multiple ones (in the case of transshipments).
• The specific identifiers for the routes to be undertaken (typically internal references used by the carrier to identify specific routes or travel lanes)

Note that the concept of intermediate ports and transhipment ports are slightly different in the context of our Sailing Schedules feature. When a transhipment happens, this will include a change in the vessel that is carrying the cargo; however, when a voyage is direct, this can still include intermediate port stops, just ones that do not include transferring cargo between different carrier vessels.

How can the Sailing Schedules feature be accessed and used?

This feature is available via the Portcast Web App. To use it, head to the left sidebar navigation, and click on "Analytics", and then on "Sailing Schedules". The following screen will show up:

Example of the default screen for the Sailing Schedules functionality, including search fields that are required for returning valid entries.

The Sailing Schedules lookup feature includes a couple of different inputs needed to find relevant sailings:

• The origin port, or port of loading (POL)
• The destination port, or port of discharge (POD)
• A date of reference, and whether that date is relative to departure from the POL, or arrival at the POD
• The time range for which to obtain scheduled sailings - for example, 2 weeks after the provided arrival or departure date

Once all necessary information has been input into the search form, the user can submit the form. The lookup for sailing schedules between the two ports of interest will run, and once complete, the results screen will be displayed:

An example screen of the Sailing Schedules result screen, including found results and port congestion for POL and POD.