Matson Container Tracking

Matson Navigation registers one owner code, MATU — no merger residue, no sister codes, which reflects a company that grew organically on its own trades rather than by absorbing rivals. If the prefix reads MATU and the check digit passes, the box is Matson’s.

MATS is the SCAC Matson names in its filings with the US Surface Transportation Board; boxes carry MATU. No Matson document we read says its bill of lading numbers begin with MATS, so enter a B/L exactly as printed. Booking references are accepted in the same search too, making Matson one of the few carriers on this site whose tracker takes all three identifier types.

The shipment-tracking page posts your query as a form, so URL parameters do nothing — we verified there is no way to deep-link a result. Type or paste the number instead. On mobile, Matson ships two dedicated apps: Matson Track My Container for boxes and Track My Auto for the vehicle-shipping business that is huge on the Hawaii and Alaska lanes.

Not from the container. A standard dry box has no power, no radio and no satellite receiver — it is a steel case with a number painted on it, and it reports nothing about itself. Every position you see against a Matson shipment was reported by something else: a terminal crane, a gate reader, or the ship.

A live map on a carrier’s tracking page is almost always plotting AIS, the transponder every large vessel broadcasts with its position, course and speed. That is genuinely useful at sea: it is a real position rather than a schedule, and an ETA recalculated from actual movement. It is also the ship’s position, not your box’s, and the two part company the moment the container is discharged.

On land the map goes quiet. Between the gate-out and the delivery there is no vessel to follow, and the road leg appears only as whatever events the terminal and the trucker report. A container sitting on a chassis in a yard shows the last position of a ship it left days ago. Only specialised IoT equipment reports its own location, and wherever that exists it is a paid product sold to the shipper, not something a tracking page gives away.

How long a container spends at sea on Matson services, port to port. Each figure below is stated by two documents for the same service and the same pair of ports — the line’s own schedule and one more — and both are linked beside it. Where we could not find two, the pair is not listed.

These are schedule figures between two ports, not delivery times: add the days before the vessel sails and after it discharges, and expect the real voyage to drift by a few days either way. A line can change a rotation at any time, so check the date on each source.

Matson has run the Hawaii trade since 1882 and its network is mostly US domestic — Hawaii, Alaska, Guam and the Pacific islands — rather than the international east–west strings everyone else on this site sails. That shows up in the feed: the schedules are fixed and frequent, the transits are short and predictable, and there is far less of the transshipment limbo that makes a box look lost for a week in an Asian hub.

It also explains the second tracker. Matson moves a large volume of vehicles alongside containers, and the two have separate apps — Track My Container for boxes and Track My Auto for cars. If you are chasing a vehicle rather than a container, the container number you are holding may not be the identifier the system wants.

MATS, not MATU. MATS is Matson’s carrier code (SCAC) and MATU is the prefix on its boxes. A container number always starts with MATU; a document number goes in exactly as printed.

No link can carry the number. We opened the page with a number in the URL and the search is posted as a form, so the parameter does nothing. A shared link always opens an empty page here, whatever the sending site implied.

MATU is the only container prefix. One code, no merger residue — so a different prefix on a Matson sailing is leased equipment, and it still tracks here.

Short trades archive sooner. A Hawaii run is measured in days, so the window before the shipment leaves the live system opens earlier than on an ocean crossing.