Consecutive voyage charter
Back-to-back voyages under one contract, and how laytime, demurrage and off-hire style interruptions are accounted across them.
A consecutive voyage charter engages a ship to perform a stated number of voyages one after another under a single contract, at a freight per voyage or per tonne, rather than for a period at daily hire.
It sits commercially between a voyage charter and a period time charter: the owner keeps the voyage cost risk that a voyage charter carries, but does so across a run of voyages, so the owner also carries the cumulative effect of port delay across the series. Laytime is normally accounted voyage by voyage while the commercial exposure is cumulative, which is the tension the drafting has to resolve.
The full article will cover how the voyage count and the performance period are drafted, laytime and demurrage accounting across a series, the ballast leg between voyages, what happens when the series cannot be completed in the stated period, and the comparison with a contract of affreightment.