Where your container is, and how to find out

There are two answers to this question and they live in two different places. Until the container leaves the terminal, the terminal knows: whether it is discharged, whether anything is holding it, and when the last free day falls. Once it is on a chassis, the terminal no longer knows anything and GPS does.

Each terminal runs its own system, and the one that matters is whichever holds your box. Availability, holds and the last free day all come from there, and none of them is visible to anybody else until the container is released.

What you need is the container number. What you will learn is whether it is available, whether customs, the line or an unpaid balance is holding it, and the date the storage clock starts. If something is holding it, that is the thing to chase: the demurrage clock does not pause while it is somebody else's paperwork.

Once we dispatch your container it stops being a row in a terminal system and becomes a leg on a dispatch board: a specific truck, a specific route, and a status that moves as the driver does, through pickup, loading, en route and delivered. That is the answer the terminal cannot give you, because by then the box is not theirs.

Dispatch runs on Vexolis, which is our own software platform rather than a third-party vendor, and we say so plainly because a shipper deserves to know whose system is answering. If you are a forwarder or a broker there is a portal side to it: one login showing every container and every leg across the carriers you ship with, instead of a different tracking site per carrier and a text thread for the rest. It is in early access rather than generally available, so ask and we will get you in.

What it will not tell you is anything about a container still sitting inside a terminal. Dispatch visibility starts when a truck is assigned to the move; before that the box belongs to the terminal and only the terminal knows, which is what the links above are for.

Send the container number and the terminal and you get the status back in writing, including the part the portals do not tell you: whether anything is going to stop the pickup, and what it would cost to leave it another day. That is a dispatcher reading the same screens, which for one container is usually faster than learning four systems.