Vela Tide turns live ship movements and port-call schedules into a shared operating picture for cruise destinations. Live vessel tracking, arrival deviation, time-phased visitors-ashore forecasting, daily-cap and congestion monitoring, berth-conflict warning, count reconciliation, and a historical archive, all served as a managed service with a free public board, embeddable widgets, and a developer API on top.

Cruise ships are tracked via AIS, which every passenger vessel broadcasts by international mandate, so there is no onboard hardware and no cooperation needed from the line. The port-call schedule is the baseline: we compare the promise to the reality and compute how early or late each ship is, deriving a true arrival from position and speed rather than the crew-typed AIS field.

Built on the Vela Context Data Hub and the ETSI NGSI-LD open standard. Designed for port funds, port authorities, municipalities, control rooms, and the wider destination ecosystem that needs to see cruise arrivals coming and plan the town around them.

A free public board. A paid port layer. Every call, accounted for. 

  From AIS to a live public board in under two weeks. The port operations layer on top.

PRICING

Single-port pilot. Before a subscription, a port can start with a fixed one-season pilot: a defined scope for one cruise season, priced as a single fixed fee sized to fit under common public-procurement thresholds.

Merchants add-on. Multi-port alerts, calendar export, single-ship watch, and API access for agents, tour operators, and shuttle firms working several ports, from €15 per month.

What counts as a port. A port with at least one cruise call in the data stream during the month. We count automatically, you do not report.

No public schedule? We build the call baseline from public sources and your own export. Excel or CSV is enough to start; the live timing is ours, via AIS.

INTEGRATIONS

PUT LIVE CRUISE ARRIVALS ON YOUR OWN PAGE 

Embeddable widgets are rolling out now. The examples above are previews built with sample data — fictional operators and routes, for illustration only. Tell us the country, town, port, or operator you'd like to show and we'll set you up as they go live.

Want to start with one port? 

If a port is not ready to subscribe, start with a single-port pilot: one cruise season, a fixed scope, and a fixed fee scoped under the direct-award threshold. We stand up the public board from AIS and a public schedule in under two weeks, add the port-operations layer once the port shares its call data, then transition onto a Tide Port subscription when you are ready. The public layer can go live immediately, with no port sign-off required.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS?

HOW DOES SHIP TRACKING WORK WITHOUT INSTALLING ANYTHING?

Every passenger vessel broadcasts AIS by international mandate. We receive it from global AIS networks, identify your calling ships automatically, build the baseline from the published schedule, and start measuring deviation. No onboard hardware and no cooperation from the cruise line.

ARE THE PASSENGER NUMBERS EXACT?

On the free public board, no, and we say so on every view. Visitors ashore is an estimate from each vessel's published capacity, which is enough to plan a shop or a taxi rank around.

Exact declared passengers per call, the berth plan, and the hour-by-hour ashore forecast come from the port's own data. The public picture exists either way. The only question is whether it runs with the port's numbers or around them.

DO WE NEED THE PORT'S COOPERATION TO START?

Not for the public layer. Live arrivals, deviation, alerts, and the visitors-ashore estimate all run on AIS and public schedules. The exact cap, berth, and ashore-flow layer is the part that uses the port's own call data.

WHAT SCHEDULE DATA DO YOU NEED?

A call list: date, ship name, scheduled arrival and departure, berth or anchorage, and expected passengers. Excel or CSV is enough for a first pilot. The live timing is ours, derived from AIS.

DOES THIS REPLACE OUR BERTH OR TERMINAL SYSTEM?

No. Tide is read-only and informational. We do not allocate berths or run terminal operations. We provide the independent measurement, the forecast, and the record, and can feed your existing systems.

HOW DO YOU HANDLE THE DAILY CAP?

We compute the declared day-load against the port's cap or coordination threshold and warn forward when a scheduled day, or a slip into the next day, would push it over. The cap enforcement view is part of the Tide Port layer.

CAN PASSENGERS AND THE PUBLIC SEE IT?

Yes. The free public board is the point: the town, merchants, tour operators, and press all see live arrivals and the estimated crowd ashore, with methodology published and a right of reply for the port.

WHICH PORTS DO YOU COVER?

We start in the Mediterranean and can add any cruise port within about two weeks: the fleet is a closed set of a few hundred ships already in our stream, so a new port is a schedule baseline plus configuration.

CAN WE EXPORT OUR DATA?

Yes. CSV, JSON, and NGSI-LD exports are all available. No lock-in, your data stays yours.

WHAT ABOUT EMISSIONS AND SHORE POWER?

Tide measures dwell time and at-berth load per call, the data base for shore-power sizing and the OPS and FuelEU Maritime readiness case. We supply the measurement and the record, not the berth hardware.

READY?