Why do I need Chartering Expertise?

In addition to the obvious risk of damage or loss to your own cargo, Chartering can entail massive liability exposure that an inexpert charterer can easily stumble into.  You can find yourself held liable for damage/loss to the ship, to lives, to port equipment, or to other ships or cargoes.  Costs due to delays in loading or discharging can spiral even when causes have nothing to do with you or your cargo. One major incident can wipe out years of profitability or even drive a going concern into bankruptcy.  Even the smallest, occasional charterers expose themselves to enormous risk every time they charter a ship and require expertise to safely manage this risk.  

Is Polaris a brokerage?

No - Polaris provides outsourced Chartering Management.  We are not a middle-man, making money through sheer volume of transactions and therefore having divided loyalties.  We function the same way your in-house Chartering Department would, representing your interests, only, with a single-minded focus on risk mitigation.

Does Polaris work with charter brokers?

Yes - A core part of our philosophy is that finding the right ship for your cargo requires the broadest possible market coverage.  A vessel owner who is not aware of your cargo cannot compete for it.  Given the hundreds of thousands of individual vessel owners in the worldwide shipping fleet, a panel of brokers who are motivated to deploy their networks to try to fix your next ship helps ensure that the owners of all suitable ships are aware of and can compete for your cargo.

Why not an exclusive broker?

Many brokers will sell you on the idea of using them as your exclusive channel. The pitch is that they will protect your interests fully and put their full expertise at your disposal.  In practice however, this rarely works out as promised. 

First, any one broker can only have a limited network. No matter how large that network of contacts is, there will be shipowners that they are not in contact with.  

Second, chartering often leads to disputes.  The risks are considerable and when costs arise, so do disputes over those costs.  Any broker who’s been around for decades will likely have owners with whom they’ve been involved in conflict over the years and who no longer work with them.  Obviously, you don’t want a potential business partner to refuse your business based on old disputes that you had no part in.  

Third, the brokerage model is based on making money based on transaction count and volume.  When there is a potential dispute, the broker is strongly incentivized to find a middle way, to reach a compromise, and to keep vessel owners reasonably happy (so they can work with them in the future), and to move on.  However, this strong desire to compromise and move on may not align with your desire to fight to minimize your risk and cost.

What if my requirements are very small?

The advantage of the Polaris model is that you can have access to a small part of a larger team.  We can work with you to accommodate your chartering needs, whatever their size.  There’s no reason to compromise between the need for top flight, professional, chartering expertise and being too small to build an in house team.