Optional Voyage Calculations in the Mobile Voyage Estimator

We have updated our Mobile Voyage Estimator application with a new feature that allows you to add optional voyage calculations to an existing voyage estimate. The main goal is to give users the ability to make reverse TCE calculations for better market benchmarking, which will make evaluating various chartering options more efficient. To start using it, tap/click the Optional Voyages button on the voyage details page.

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First, you will see a summary of the base voyage calculation. Let’s consider this a voyage estimate that you have just worked on. In many cases it takes time before you can freeze a voyage and reach an agreement with your business partner, and in order to negotiate a better freight rate you often need to run some reverse TCE calculations. To quickly make some calculations based on the current estimate you can add optional voyages to play around with different parameters and freight rates. Let’s go through an example get a better idea of how this works. Tap/click Create New Voyage to add a new optional voyage. Let’s add two optional voyages to get more flexibility.

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The two new optional voyages are created using the same parameters as your base voyage. In both cases the discharge port is Tokyo and the freight rate is $54.595/MT.

Once you add a new optional voyage you will be able to change the TCE and run reverse calculations.

However, before changing the TCE you should update any of the input parameters for the added optional voyages, otherwise the result will not change. Let’s change the discharge port for the first optional voyage to Osaka and Fukuoka for the second. This will trigger a reverse calculation for both optional voyages using the new discharge ports and the current TCE of $14,266.67.

Now, let’s consider that with the current TCE result of $14,266.67 this voyage would not be profitable enough and you need to negotiate a better freight rate. Based on previous experience you know that if the TCE could be increased to $20,000 it would be good enough to proceed. Let’s update the TCE to get new freight rates for both optional voyages and the base voyage.

The system will reverse calculate the new freight rate using the new TCE value of $20,000. The new freight rates are $69.207/MT and $68.684, respectively. It’s important to note that you can always go back to the voyage details page and update a parameter on the base voyage (e.g. broker commission). The system will return a new TCE result for the base voyage and the new TCE result will be used to recalculate all optional voyages to match the new TCE.

Press the blue button, located bottom right, to get to the top and see the result changes.

If you go back to the optional voyages page all optional voyages are updated using our previously set discharge ports. Please note that your optional voyages will not be saved in the system and if you refresh the page all optional voyages will be lost.

We have written a separate blog post to cover the list of all recent updates to the Mobile Voyage Estimator. You can find it here.