Published 04 August 2026 in International Shipping News.

Ask ten maritime professionals what they need from a vessel-tracking platform, and the answers will vary widely. A harbour pilot wants centimetre-level clearance data. A charterer needs a fast, defensible ETA. A port agent wants to know what is arriving within the next 72 hours. The jobs differ and the questions differ, but the underlying need is the same: a reliable, real-time view of where vessels are, where they are headed, and how long the voyage will take.

Within the MarineTraffic mobile app, two features carry most of the operational load: nautical charts on the Live Map, and the Voyage Planner. Both serve as core tools for professionals who rely on maritime intelligence. What follows is an examination of how different roles in the industry use these features — and why.

What Nautical Charts Actually Display

Before exploring the use cases, it is worth clarifying what a nautical chart layer provides beyond a standard map. On the MarineTraffic Live Map, switching to nautical charts renders navigable waters using the same dark blue palette found in traditional chartwork. Land appears in earth tones and sea in lighter blue, providing contrast against vessel icons and past-track playback.

The layer includes:

• Bathymetry (water depth, measured in metres)
• Shoreline and seafloor features
• Hazards, including rocks and wrecks
• Aids to navigation, such as buoys and lighthouses
• Tidal and current information
• Special marks, anchorages, and caution areas, using standard international and US chart symbology

This is fundamentally different from a light, dark, or satellite map, all of which are designed for visual clarity and general orientation rather than course plotting.

What the Voyage Planner Calculates

The MarineTraffic Voyage Planner estimates transit time, distance, and route for a vessel across a single-leg or multi-leg journey. The workflow comprises five steps:

1. Set an origin. This can be a port, a vessel, a point selected directly on the map, or the user's current device location.
2. Set a destination, and add intermediate leg destinations for multi-stop voyages (for example, Lisbon to Rotterdam to Helsinki).
3. Adjust voyage parameters, including estimated time of departure, timezone (UTC, local device time, or the departure port's local time), and planned speed.
4. Choose canal and passage avoidance, toggling off the Suez Canal, Panama Canal, Kiel Canal, Arctic Passage, or inland waterways as needed.
5. Calculate the route to generate an estimated time and path.

The result is a defensible, adjustable estimate that accounts for real routing constraints — not merely a straight-line distance calculation.

One Map, Four Use Cases

Nautical charts, route planning, and ETA estimation are not competing tools. They are driven by the same AIS data — the Automatic Identification System mandated by the International Maritime Organization under SOLAS for vessels of 300 gross tonnage and above on international voyages, as well as all passenger ships — and by frequently updated models designed to answer the specific questions each role demands.

1. Pilots and Deck Officers

For harbour pilots and deck officers, the Nautical Charts layer functions as a live extension of the passage plan. Bathymetry data is not merely a reference detail; it is the primary input for determining whether a vessel will clear a given depth at a specific point in the tide cycle. Hazard markers (rocks, wrecks) and aids to navigation (buoys, lighthouses) allow officers to cross-check their real-time position against the same symbology they already use on paper and ECDIS charts — electronic chart display systems whose mandatory carriage the IMO phased in across commercial fleets between 2012 and 2018 — reducing the translation cost between systems.

Past-track and playback are easier to interpret against a nautical base map than a road-style map, because the surrounding depth and hazard context performs some of the analytical work automatically. For a pilot judging clearance in a busy approach, or an officer reconstructing a vessel's recent track before boarding, this context is the difference between a data point and a decision-support tool.

2. Port Agents and Terminal Operators

Port agents and terminal operators tend to use nautical charts and the Voyage Planner in combination — one for spatial awareness, the other for timing.

• Nautical charts help confirm anchorage locations and caution areas near a berth, which is critical when coordinating multiple simultaneous arrivals in constrained port waters.
• The Voyage Planner answers the more immediate operational question: given a vessel's current position and speed, when will it actually arrive, and does that estimate hold up against canal transit assumptions?

A port agent managing several inbound vessels can use the Voyage Planner to sanity-check an ETA against a known average speed, then reference the nautical chart layer to confirm there is nothing in the immediate approach — a shoal, a restricted anchorage — that would affect final approach timing. In this scenario, the two tools are genuinely complementary rather than overlapping.

3. Charterers and Commercial Operators

Charterers, commercial operators, and fleet or operations managers use the Voyage Planner primarily as a route and timing sense-check. Multi-leg routing is particularly valuable in this context: a commercial team evaluating a proposed fixture can model a full multi-port itinerary (origin, one or more leg destinations, final port) and observe how canal avoidance assumptions or a different planned speed shift the total transit time.

This has several specific commercial implications:

• Speed sensitivity. Comparing a laden speed against an eco speed reveals the transit time and, indirectly, the bunker cost trade-off of a routing decision.
• Canal and passage risk. Toggling Suez or Panama avoidance on or off provides a fast comparison of alternative routing without requiring a separate distance table — a feature that carries heightened operational relevance following documented disruptions, including the six-day blockage of the Suez Canal by the containership Ever Given in March 2021.
• ETD flexibility. Adjusting the estimated time of departure and viewing results in local port time rather than UTC makes it easier to align a routing estimate with a laycan window or berth slot.

This serves as a fast, credible first pass before committing to more detailed fixture work — a tool used constantly rather than occasionally.

4. Fleet and Operations Managers

Beyond charts and route planning, the ability to filter the Live Map by vessel type (cargo, tankers, passenger, high speed, tug, fishing, pleasure craft, navigation aids) gives fleet and operations managers a cleaner operational picture when monitoring a specific segment.

A dry bulk operator scanning for tanker congestion in a strait, or a tug and towage coordinator isolating other tugs in a harbour, benefits from removing visual noise that is irrelevant to the task at hand. Combined with vessel name display, this transforms a general-purpose traffic map into a filtered operational view tailored to a specific fleet or segment.

A Note on Data Reliability

Both features are only as useful as the AIS data feeding them. AIS signals can be affected by satellite coverage gaps in remote ocean regions, transponder errors, and gaps in coastal receiver infrastructure. Nautical chart context (depth, hazards, tidal state) is static reference data, while Voyage Planner estimates depend on accurate speed and position inputs.

For most professional use cases, this means treating both tools as strong first-pass decision support rather than a replacement for official Admiralty charts, ECDIS, or a full voyage estimation platform. The value lies in speed and accessibility — obtaining a credible answer in seconds, from the same interface used for daily vessel tracking, rather than switching between systems for every routine check.

Why This Matters Across the Maritime Data Stack

Nautical charts and the Voyage Planner occupy different points in the same workflow. One provides spatial and hazard context for the present moment. The other delivers a forward-looking time and route estimate.

Used separately, each solves a specific problem. Used together, they answer the two questions that arise in almost every maritime operations role: where exactly is this vessel relative to hazards and depth, and when will it actually get where it is going.

Source: Kpler via Hellenic Shipping News