MarineTraffic hears ships through shore stations and satellites, then lays its own calculated ETA, port call and congestion figures beside the raw broadcast. We extract MarineTraffic data on your schedule.
You send a fleet, a port list or a market segment, and we build the collectors around it. ScrapeIt writes the parsing logic against MarineTraffic markup, runs it on the cadence you set and hands back a sample before the full pass. Anti-bot handling, proxy rotation and CAPTCHA solving are part of the service - the platform sits behind a challenge that refuses plain automated clients, so the collectors behave like real browsers. Its published crawl rules leave map, vessel and port paths open to ordinary search crawlers while naming the AI training crawlers that are turned away, and we work inside what they say.
We work with the ship, the port and the cargo flow. Crew lists and any other information about the people on board are outside what we collect. Nothing behind a login is touched, so anything a signed-out visitor cannot reach is scoped out before the quote instead of being promised and quietly dropped.
We extract MarineTraffic data field by field and keep the platform's own column names, so a row traces back to the surface it came off.
Ports carry a card of their own: name, country, UN/LOCODE, alternative names, coordinates, port type, terminal and berth counts, the related anchorage, the maximum draught and length accepted, vessels in port and expected arrivals. Delivery is CSV, JSON, XLSX or a warehouse load, with a capture moment on every row.
Calculated fields sit beside raw AIS fields, and they are not the same thing. ETA is whatever the crew typed; ETA_CALC is what MarineTraffic worked out, with ETA_UPDATED recording when it did the sum and SPEED_CALC the speed it used. Destination is free text of up to 20 characters; the resolved next port id, UN/LOCODE and name are the platform's reading of it, and they come back empty when the string is an abbreviation nobody recognises, when the crew never updated it, or when the last position is hours old. Carrying both columns is the only way to audit that gap later.
Events are a separate stream with their own ids. First and intermediate daily position for the midnight and noon reports, in range and out of range, stopped and underway, drifting, AIS off when a transponder goes quiet inside covered water, name changed, flag changed, destination changed, and the proximity events that mark ship-to-ship work. Those are the rows a due diligence or sanctions workflow keys on, next to the platform's spoofing notes on position jumps and duplicate identities.
Congestion is computed weekly, not watched live. It arrives as median days at anchorage and median days in port, per port, per week, per market and per size class, with week-on-week differences and the vessel and call counts behind each median. Markets are the platform's own taxonomy - container ships, dry bulk, dry breakbulk, wet bulk, LNG and LPG carriers, ro-ro, passenger, offshore and rigs, fishing and pleasure craft - and size classes run small feeder to ULCV on TEU, handysize to VLCC on deadweight.
MarineTraffic is a ship tracking platform built on AIS, the Automatic Identification System that SOLAS requires on every vessel of 300 gross tonnage and upwards sailing an international voyage. Planning a MarineTraffic scraper starts with one fact about the source: AIS arrives as two different kinds of message, and the platform keeps them apart.
Dynamic messages leave the transponder on their own - position, speed over ground, course over ground, heading, rate of turn, navigational status and the UTC second the packet was generated. A Class A unit repeats them every 2 to 10 seconds under way and about every 3 minutes at anchor. A Class B unit reports far less often and omits IMO number, draught, destination, ETA, rate of turn and navigational status altogether. Static and voyage messages are typed in by the ship's officers and repeat every 6 minutes: IMO number, call sign, name, ship type, dimensions, draught, destination and ETA. That split explains most of what later looks like an error. A position can be minutes old while the destination printed next to it has been wrong for a week.
The addresses read cleanly. A ship sits at /en/ais/details/ships/{mmsi}, or at the longer /en/ais/details/ships/shipid:{id}/mmsi:{mmsi}/imo:{imo}/vessel:{NAME}; a port sits at /en/ais/details/ports/{id}; the live map carries its own centre point and zoom level in the path. Behind the map, the left pane opens the Vessels database, the Ports database, Arrivals and Departures, Berth Calls, Expected Arrivals, Position History, Voyage Timeline and Vessel Events. Those are the list surfaces, and they are where a crawl gets sliced.
Get a Quote
Developers
Customers worldwide
Pages extracted
Hours saved for our clients
€199 / one-time
setup fee - included
€169 / mo
setup fee €499
€229 / mo
setup fee €499
€349 / mo
setup fee €499
€549 / mo
setup fee €799
MarineTraffic runs a real API, and it is the first thing to check. The AIS Data API answers at services.marinetraffic.com/api with the key carried as an api_key path segment, and it covers vessel positions and historical tracks, port calls, berth calls, vessel events, particulars, voyage forecasts, predictive destinations, ETA to a port you name, expected arrivals and port congestion. One endpoint returns nothing but your credits balance: API services are metered and sold apart from the website plans - an Enterprise subscription does not include API access, and keys are issued through sales.
The limits are concrete. Call frequency is written into the contract, often one call every two minutes for a simple response and one an hour for an extended one, under a hard ceiling of 100 requests a minute. Position age caps at 60 minutes terrestrial and 180 satellite, legacy particulars page 100 rows at a time, and historical polling ranges stop at 190 days. MarineTraffic pricing for the API is quoted case by case, and a wide sweep - every arrival at fifty ports, a year of calls for a fleet - is where a MarineTraffic scraper is the cheaper instrument.
The website has its own ceilings. Each database view returns at most 500 records per search. Export is monthly and tiered: five records on Basic, 300 on Essential, ten thousand on Enterprise, all as CSV. The port call log reaches back three days, seven days or five years by plan, satellite positions need Essential or above, and congestion, ownership and voyage reports sit behind Enterprise alone.
Learn how to use web scraping to solve data problems for your organization
Leveraging advances in technology, the AI-powered web scraper has skyrocketed in demand and is helping to expand capabilities by automating tedious daily tasks and speeding up data collection from thousands of websites several times over.
Web scraping is a method of obtaining web data by extracting it from pages of web resources with the help of a program, that is, in automatic mode. It is used to syntactically convert web pages into more usable forms.
If you specialize in machine learning, you need to feed large amounts of data to the algorithms. Web scraping is the easiest and the most efficient method of collecting the data from all over the Internet.
ScrapeIt runs the MarineTraffic scraper as a managed service. Our team builds the collectors, watches them as the platform changes and repairs them when it does. You receive files or an endpoint - CSV, JSON, XLSX or a database drop - with nothing to install and no infrastructure to keep alive. When the official API is the cheaper answer to what you actually asked for, we say so before the project starts rather than after the invoice. We publish no freight forecasts and no trading calls; we deliver the rows and the conclusions stay yours. Clients come for supply chain monitoring, port utilisation, freight market analysis and sanctions screening, and each is scoped differently.
Yes, and it is substantial. The AIS Data API serves vessel positions and historical tracks, port calls and berth calls, vessel events, particulars, voyage forecasts, predictive destinations, ETA to a named port, expected arrivals and port congestion, in XML, CSV or JSON. It is not open to sign-up: keys come through sales, they are metered against a credits balance, and holding a website subscription does not grant API access. Call limits are tight on entry contracts - one call every two minutes for a simple response, one an hour for an extended one - and position windows cap at 60 minutes terrestrial and 180 satellite.
The vessel card in full: name, MMSI, IMO, call sign, flag, ship type, length and breadth, depth, draught, year built, builder and yard, gross and net tonnage, deadweight, TEU or gas and grain capacity, engine builder, power and service speed, plus registered owner, beneficial owner, commercial and technical managers, ISM manager and insurer. On the voyage side, destination, reported and calculated ETA, last, current and next port with UN/LOCODE, distance to go and distance travelled. Port records add terminal and berth counts, anchorage, maximum draught and length accepted, and the arrival and departure log.
Freshness is set by physics before it is set by us. In range of a shore station a vessel updates roughly once a minute after downsampling; out at sea, satellite coverage may deliver a position every few minutes or every few hours, and roughly one an hour is normal for an ocean-going Class A ship. Stored history thins out past three months. So we agree a cadence - hourly, several times a day, daily - and deliver a series of snapshots with the capture time stamped on each row. We do not sell a live feed, and we will not pretend a crawl is one.
Yes, and they are three different shapes of record. Port calls give one row per arrival or departure with timestamps, draught, load status, load or discharge operation and leg distance. Berth calls go a level deeper, down to the named berth and terminal with dock and undock times and minutes at berth. Congestion is a weekly median - days at anchorage and days in port, split by commercial market and size class, with week-on-week movement. Give us a port list by UN/LOCODE and a date range and we scope the pass around it.
We work only on pages a signed-out visitor can open, we do not log in, and we stay inside the crawl rules the site publishes. What comes back describes hulls, berths and cargo movements - the subject of each record is a ship or a company, never a private person, and we collect nothing about the crew. Where the rules bite hardest is redistribution: what you may pass to a third party depends on the terms attached to the feed the figures ultimately came from. We are not lawyers, so put a resale or publishing plan in front of your own counsel before we start.
Step 1 - Make a Request
You share your needs, expectations, and desired timeframe. We’ll suggest the best solution based on your request and budget.
Step 2 - Configuring Custom Web Crawlers
Our specialists configure the crawlers and extract a sample dataset for your review before proceeding with the full-scale extraction.
Step 3 - Collect and Deliver
Once you approve the sample, we launch the project and start full data collection. We gather, filter, and structure the data for easy use, delivering it on time in your preferred format.
Step 4 - Maintain and Support
Our team manages ongoing processes, monitors website changes, and supports all data extraction cycles. We can also help integrate data into your systems or create dashboards to simplify analysis.
Scrapeit Sp. z o.o.
10/208 Legionowa str., 15-099, Bialystok, Poland
NIP: 5423457175
REGON: 523384582
