How to scrape vessel data from VesselFinder

VesselFinder tracks hundreds of thousands of ships worldwide. The vessel list at vesselfinder.com/vessels is one of the most complete public directories of maritime assets available, covering cargo ships, tankers, cruise liners, and more. Getting that data into a spreadsheet for analysis, research, or fleet monitoring normally means a lot of manual copying. This tutorial shows how to do it automatically using the Minexa Chrome extension.

What data you can extract from VesselFinder

Each row in the VesselFinder vessel list contains a rich set of fields. Here is a sample of what Minexa pulls out:

[
  {
    "vessel": "PRELUDE",
    "flag_country": "Australia",
    "built": "2017",
    "dwt": "394330",
    "gt": "499167",
    "size_m": "489 / 74",
    "vessel_details_link": "/vessels/details/9648714"
  },
  {
    "vessel": "PIONEERING SPIRIT",
    "flag_country": "Malta",
    "built": "2014",
    "dwt": "499125",
    "gt": "403342",
    "size_m": "382 / 124",
    "vessel_details_link": "/vessels/details/9593505"
  }
]

Fields include vessel name, flag country, year built, deadweight tonnage, gross tonnage, dimensions in metres, and a direct link to each vessel detail page. Ship photo URLs are also captured automatically.

Step-by-step: scraping VesselFinder with Minexa

Step 1: Open the VesselFinder vessels page Navigate to https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels in Chrome.

Step 2: Open the Minexa extension Click the Minexa icon in your Chrome toolbar. In the popup, confirm you are on the right page.

Step 3: Confirm pagination detection Minexa detects the pagination method automatically. Review the detected pages and click Continue.

Step 4: Choose list only or list with detail pages At this point you can choose to scrape just the list, or have Minexa follow each vessel link and extract the full detail page too.

Step 5: Minexa highlights the data container The extension automatically identifies the repeating vessel rows on the page. No manual field selection needed.

Step 6: Review extracted columns and run All detected data points are listed. Use the next/prev navigation to browse them, then create the scraper and run the job.

Step 7: Export your data Once the job finishes, export to Excel or JSON directly from the results table.

Watch the full tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNj_sfvwdt0

Scheduling for ongoing fleet monitoring

The VesselFinder vessel list updates regularly. Once your scraper is configured, you can schedule it to run daily or weekly so your dataset stays current without any manual work. This is useful for tracking fleet changes, new vessel registrations, or shifts in flag country distribution over time.

Install the Minexa extension and have your first VesselFinder dataset ready in under ten minutes.