Fuel Surcharge Governance: What Every Freight Procurement Team Should Know Before the Next Tender

Fuel Surcharge Governance: What Every Freight Procurement Team Should Know Before the Next Tender

Fuel surcharges are a material part of ocean freight spend. But can your procurement team explain and validate the surcharge amount applied?

Market disruptions are here to stay. Geopolitical events, fuel price volatility, changing trade routes, and evolving regulations continue to reshape transportation costs. For freight procurement teams, this makes understanding, benchmarking and governing fuel surcharges increasingly important.

Tracking bunker prices is no longer enough. BAF, Emergency Fuel Surcharges, EU ETS pass-throughs and alternative-fuel premiums can all affect the final cost of moving your cargo, while different methodologies and assumptions can make charges difficult to compare and assess.

The challenge is not to question every surcharge. It is to have the right data and framework to understand what is driving the cost, identify material variances, and have more transparent, fact-based conversations with carriers.

And the best time to establish those rules is before the next tender is awarded.

Join Bart A. De Muynck, Industry Expert and Advisor and Constantine Komodromos, Founder & CEO of VesselBot, for a practical discussion on how freight procurement teams can move from fuel surcharge complexity to stronger governance.

What you'll learn

• Understand the importance of the fuel surcharge line item. See the formula behind fuel surcharges, and discover the Trade Factor, the variable that translates the bunker price into the commercial surcharge.
• Identify where you stand. Learn how to read an operational benchmark against your own invoices, and identify your exposure across trades, carriers and service profiles, even when bunker price movements are similar.
• Analyze the levers shippers can pull. See how an independent operational benchmark can identify material variances in surcharge costs and provide fact-based arguments for carrier negotiations.
• Take action. Set clearer fuel-surcharge guardrails before your next tender. Use the insights to create a contractual fuel surcharge baseline that helps you secure more predictable rates and build long-term value.

September 23, 2026 I 12.00pm EDT / 17.00pm BST

Register to learn what to benchmark, what questions to ask, and what to define before your next ocean freight tender.