FourOneOne推出Provar平台，帮助承运商申诉不当滞箱费和滞期费

By Charlotte Goldstone

30 October 2026

Congestion today could mean a fresh wave of disputed detention and demurrage (D&D) charges tomorrow, according to Sara Dandan, founder of FourOneOne.

She told The Loadstar disruption at ports, including growing backlogs of containers at Los Angeles and Long Beach, was likely to translate into extra invoices in the coming weeks.

“Today’s problem is actually tomorrow’s problem,” said Ms Dandan. “If there is congestion in October, those invoices usually start hitting in November.”

She pointed to reports of 34,000 containers waiting for rail at Los Angeles and Long Beach, alongside growing difficulties returning empty containers, as terminals struggle to clear backlogs. Looming port strikes are also expected to exacerbate these issues.

Such circumstances could leave truckers exposed to charges, despite the delays being outside their control, added Ms Dandan.

However, the US Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) has established that the purpose of demurrage and detention fees is to incentivise the movement of cargo, rather than penalise operators for circumstances they cannot influence.

Where delays result from terminal closures, unavailable appointments, holidays, or restrictions on empty container returns, Ms Dandan argued, the rationale for imposing charges should no longer apply.

“It’s much more often that you can’t return it [a box], or you can’t pick it up, than it is that you just didn’t,” she said.

Nevertheless, Ms Dandan noted that many operators paid invoices rather than dispute them, either to avoid delaying operations or because challenging relatively small amounts can be prohibitively expensive.

For smaller drayage businesses, even small bills can threaten their survival, while the cost of hiring lawyers or dedicating staff to lengthy complaints processes often makes fighting individual invoices uneconomical.

“It’s death by a thousand invoices,” Ms Dandan said.

She has designed Provar, which approaches its first anniversary in December, a platform to address that imbalance by collecting and preserving the evidence needed to challenge improper charges.

It documents terminal conditions, appointment availability, and empty-return restrictions, preserving evidence to establish whether operators had a reasonable opportunity to collect or return containers during periods in question.

Provar covers terminals in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, and Seattle. Users submit their active containers, allowing the platform to automatically identify the relevant terminal and compile the supporting evidence.

A dispute function helps users easily prepare formal fee challenges by combining invoices, dispute reasons, and supporting documentation into a downloadable PDF letter for submission to the shipping line.

The platform also incorporates digital integrity verification to help establish that the underlying evidence has not been altered, addressing concerns about the reliability of evidence submitted in disputes.

Ms Dandan said the aim was to make challenging charges viable for businesses of every size, rather than leaving operators to absorb costs because the administrative burden outweighed the invoice.

“Whether you’re a humongous trucker with thousands of containers, or whether you only have a dozen, it’s still the same principle,” she said. “It empowers them to do more and do it more effectively.”

However, she warned that shipping lines’ evidentiary requirements were becoming “increasingly demanding”, with some requiring documentation of empty-return restrictions extending beyond the date of the disputed charge.

FourOneOne has introduced a ‘plus one’ feature to document those conditions in advance.

Ultimately, Ms Dandan believes that making disputes quicker, cheaper, and better supported by objective evidence could also change behaviour among shipping lines.