Ship vetting is the due diligence a charterer or terminal runs before trusting a vessel with its cargo. It draws on inspection regimes such as SIRE 2.0, RightShip and CDI alongside the charterer's own criteria, and it is commercial, not regulatory: a ship can hold every certificate the law requires and still fail vetting. Passing decides who will hire the ship at all.
How it shows up in practice
The moment a broker proposes a vessel for a fixture, the charterer's vetting department goes to work. For a tanker, that means pulling the latest SIRE 2.0 report and reading the observations, checking the operator's TMSA submission, and reviewing PSC history, incident records and terminal feedback. For a bulk carrier, the reviewer opens RightShip and reads the Safety Score against the company's own threshold. The screening repeats for every voyage: an approval from last month does not carry over automatically, and a new observation or detention can change the answer overnight.
The decision usually arrives as a plain yes or no, often within hours, and the reasons are rarely explained. A rejected ship does not get a hearing; the fixture simply goes to the next vessel on the broker's list. Terminals run their own screening on top, so a charterer's approval can still be undone at the berth. The full sequence, from nomination to clearance, is walked through in charterer vetting explained.
What it means for operators
Vetting sits directly in the revenue path. Class, flag and PSC decide whether a ship may sail; vetting decides whether anyone will pay it to. That distinction, drawn out in vetting vs class vs flag vs PSC, is why a vessel with a clean regulatory record can still sit idle. The inputs to a vetting decision accumulate over years, but the decision itself takes hours, so the only workable strategy is to keep the record clean continuously: prepare before every inspection, respond to findings with evidence, and know what the databases say about your ship before the charterer reads them. How Fleetward supports that cycle is on the vetting solution page.