The charter is a contract for transporting a fixed amount and type of cargo by a particular ship between certain ports and at a pre-agreed price. It is the most widely distributed form of charter. The charter is one type of charter party. In addition to the charter, there are several other ways of capturing cargo in contract form (For example, time-raising, cascading, etc.).
The entire ship can be chartered for the carriage of a full load and for a predetermined journey. This can be a single trip, a trip and a return trip or a trip involving different ports. On the other hand, it is also possible to charter only part of the ship. For a chartered ship, the agreement is called charter party. For a full load, which belongs to 1 single skipper, the two parties (charter and shipowner) will discuss all aspects of the agreement in detail. Since the shipowner must match one single person, it will be possible to draw up a charter agreement. This charter agreement is called the charter party. It is also possible that the shipowner is confronted with a number of charterers (eg a container ship with thousands of containers from different owners on board). In this case, it is impossible for the shipowner to draw up a separate agreement with all the charterers. In these cases, the lease agreement must not necessarily be determined by a charter party but may be determined in other ways. In the liner shipping, the charter party is replaced by a document that is uniform and which is not negotiated. This document is called the bill of charge.
Usually the costs (fixed and variable) are paid by the shipowner. The charter agreement determines who is responsible for the cost of shipping the cargo.
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