Reading an arrival notice

An arrival notice is the first piece of paper in a drayage move, and it is the one most often read badly — usually because it looks simpler than it is. Somebody skims it for the container number and the last free day, creates a load, and moves on. Two of the fields they skipped decide which terminal the truck goes to and who is allowed to authorise the release.

Worth being clear about what the document is: it is a notification from the carrier or its agent that the cargo has arrived or is about to, sent to the consignee and the notify party. It is not a release. It usually arrives with the charges due before release, which is a different thing again.

The fields, and what to do with each

Issuing party and bill of lading

Look first at who sent it. The vessel-operating carrier, or an NVOCC?

This determines almost everything downstream. Your free time, your demurrage tariff and the party you pay for release all come from whoever issued the bill of lading you are holding. Under a house bill issued by an NVOCC, your free time is the NVOCC's, not the steamship line's — and you will not find it by looking the container up on the line's website. Under a master bill you are dealing with the line directly.

Note both numbers when both exist. The master is between the line and the NVOCC; the house is between the NVOCC and the shipper or consignee. Which one you hold governs what tracking you can see and whose portal will answer you.

Vessel and voyage

The sailing. Two practical uses.

First, it is how terminals index availability. When a container is not showing up where you expect, the vessel and voyage are how you find out whether it discharged at all.

Second, on many tariffs the free-time clock is anchored to discharge from that vessel. So the vessel and voyage are not reference trivia — they are the thing you use to establish the date the clock started, which is the same date you will need if you ever dispute a demurrage invoice.

ETA, discharge and availability

The arrival notice's ETA is an estimate made before the vessel arrived, and by the time you read the notice it is frequently stale.

Free time counts from discharge or availability, depending on the tariff — not from the ETA on the notice. Get the real discharge date and the date the box becomes appointable from the terminal. If the notice states a last free day at all, treat it as a starting hypothesis and confirm it against the terminal or the line's portal before it drives any decision.

Place of delivery and port of discharge

These are not the same field and the difference will send a truck to the wrong city.

On a through bill of lading, a container can discharge at one port and continue by rail to an inland ramp. The port of discharge is where it came off the vessel. The place of delivery is where the carrier's obligation ends and your dray begins.

The place of delivery determines the terminal or ramp, which appointment system you are fighting, which chassis pool applies, and what a realistic transit time to the consignee looks like. Read it before you quote, not after you dispatch.

The container list

Numbers, size and type, seal numbers, weight per container, piece count.

• Normalise the container number on entry — uppercase, no spaces, no dashes, so that MSMU 461 5308 and msmu-4615308 both land as MSMU4615308. Staff type them inconsistently, and inconsistent numbers are unsearchable numbers — which matters enormously six weeks later when a demurrage invoice arrives referencing one and nothing else.
• Type drives equipment. A 40-foot high cube needs a suitable chassis. A reefer needs a genset or a plug and someone accountable for the temperature. A flat rack or an out-of-gauge box needs permits and securement. An overweight container needs a triaxle and may need a routed permit.
• Weight decides whether the move is legal, whether it can go direct or must be transloaded, and whether the customer's assumption about a single delivery survives contact with the axle limits.
• Each container is at least one load. If the freight is being transloaded or split across deliveries, one container becomes several — and every one of them still points back to the same box for the per diem clock.

Consignee and notify party

The two most consequential fields on the document, and the ones most often glanced past.

The consignee is the party entitled to the cargo. The notify party is simply who gets told it has arrived, and is frequently the customs broker or the freight forwarder rather than the owner of the goods.

They are often different companies. What matters operationally is that authority to release and authority to instruct come from the consignee side. If your customer is named as the notify party but somebody else is the consignee, you need that relationship documented before you move — a delivery order or written instruction, not a phone call you remember.

Charges due and the two releases

The notice usually lists what the carrier wants before it will release: ocean freight if the bill is collect, terminal handling, documentation, chassis, and the line's own fees.

Then check that both releases are in place, because they are separate and people conflate them constantly:

• The line release. The freight is paid and the bill of lading is surrendered — an original presented, or a telex or express release on file.
• The customs release. The entry is filed and cleared, and the ISF was on file.

Both, or the box does not move. And the terminal's hold list may show more than those two: a freight hold, a customs hold, an exam, a USDA hold, an unpaid terminal fee. Any single hold is enough to stop you, and — this is the expensive part — none of them stop demurrage accruing while you wait.

Marks, commodity and HTS

Read for exam exposure, for hazmat, and for whether transloading is physically sensible. A commodity that attracts examinations is a commodity whose last free day you should be treating as tighter than it looks.

Multi-party notices

One arrival notice can cover several containers, several consignees, or several notify parties. A consolidated or co-loaded shipment where a forwarder has put four importers in one container is the common case, and it is the case people mishandle.

The mistake is creating one load. The notice covers one shipment as the carrier sees it, but you are performing several deliveries for several parties with separate instructions, separate delivery orders and — critically — separate billing.

Handle it by splitting the notice into its parties: one set of loads per consignee, keeping the notice itself as the parent record that the loads point back to. Then two things stay true that otherwise will not:

• The charges reconcile. Costs incurred against the container — demurrage, per diem, the chassis — are apportioned across the deliveries rather than landing arbitrarily on whichever load happened to be created first.
• Delay hits everyone visibly. When a co-loaded box goes past its last free day, every party on that notice is accruing, and the reason one importer's customs broker was slow is now something you can show to the other three.

A routine for the two minutes after it lands

1. Identify the issuer and whether you are holding a master or a house bill.
2. Confirm the place of delivery, and from it the terminal, the appointment system and the chassis pool.
3. Get availability and the last free day from the terminal — not from the notice — and record where the number came from.
4. Confirm both releases, line and customs, and check the terminal hold list.
5. Create the loads: one per container, more if the freight splits, and normalise every container number on the way in.
6. Note the equipment implications from size, type and weight before quoting a carrier.
7. Put the last free day and the per diem allowance on a clock.

Then file the notice against the loads. When a demurrage invoice turns up three weeks later referencing a container number and nothing else, the arrival notice, the availability date you recorded and the terminal screenshots are your entire case. Reconstructing them from memory is not a case at all.