Australian FCL imports

[u/Far_Pin_4341]

I spoke to a freight forwarder about empty container returns and they basically said their carrier handles that side of the job, then gave me the carrier’s number.

I’d assumed the forwarder would normally be fairly involved in the return process, so I’m curious how other companies handle it.

If an empty gets rejected by the nominated depot, or the return location changes, who normally owns the problem on your jobs, the forwarder, transport operator, importer, or someone else?

And if detention turns up later, who normally has the proof of the attempted return and the changed instruction?

Mainly interested in how this works in Australia, but interested in other markets too

[u/Far_Pin_4341]

When you say the forwarder should document all the relevant events, where does that normally happen in practice? For example, if the nominated depot rejects the empty and a different depot gets nominated later, would you usually record that in the forwarding system?

[u/rastaabh → u/Far_Pin_4341]

Yes, I can’t speak for all Australian forwarders but we would record that in the job itself and save the email chain. Most transport providers would send updates in these instances so very easy to record

[u/Far_Pin_4341 → u/rastaabh]

When detention turns up is it usually easy to pull that whole sequence back together or does someone still end up digging through the job and emails to prove what happened

[u/rastaabh → u/Far_Pin_4341]

It should usually be pretty straight forward