A consultative approach to charter party agreements based on virtual on time arrival

Charter Party agreements underpin the relationship between ship owners and charterers. The agreement guarantees the performance of a vessel in terms of speed and fuel consumption. On this basis the charterers plan the arrival of their cargo and their profit margin. However, ship performance is degraded by age, periods between maintenance and many vessels fail to perform as expected. Moreover the performance is only warranted during the specific conditions stated in the charter party which are not always clear. These usually refer to Beaufort Force (BF) and the Douglas Sea and Swell (DSS) scale which is archaic in the age of Numerical Weather Prediction. Given these conditions, the stage is set for conflict and there are often disputes over the weather conditions experienced. Moreover ships’ often do not arrive on time because the charterer has assumed that the ship will make good its warranted speed and not taken account of the forecast weather conditions. The authors propose a new way of approaching charter agreements with the emphasis on consultation rather than confrontation facilitated by a new web based software platform.