In the shipping world, few things are more frustrating than your shipment being delayed. You’ve either got an angry customer yelling in your ear, or your company’s production is being held up because of a part that has yet to arrive. Either way, for lack of a better word, it sucks. But the first step to easing frustration is understanding the underlying problem behind LTL freight delays and knowing what to expect moving forward.

When shipping LTL, delays can happen for a number of reasons and every scenario is unique. However, there are commonalities across the industry. It would take much too long to address every cause for delay in this post, but we’ll tackle the most common reasons freight isn’t delivered on time!

 

Weather

Although weather related LTL freight delays, like all delays, are frustrating, these are the most easily explained and understood. Like the recent catastrophes of Hurricanes Harvey & Irma, natural disasters can wreak havoc regionally, but also have nationwide effects on when you receive your freight. When terminals are shut down because of weather, operations come to a screeching halt. Freight piles up and can cause delays for months after the actual event. Since freight is handled on a first-in, first-out basis, it’s often just a waiting game.

High Freight Volumes

This is a term that gets tossed around a lot. With larger carriers, most of their freight goes through large hubs around the country. For R&L, this might be Wilmington, Ohio, where their headquarters is located. For Central Transport, this is often Chicago, Illinois, where they’re based out of. Though the location of these hubs vary, they all have one thing in common: so much freight passes through there on a daily basis that they can’t move it as fast as it comes in. So their solution is to load this freight on trucks in the order they arrived to the terminal in question, this can cause LTL freight delays.

Delivery Appointments

If any shipment has a delivery appointment service added, this always adds at least one day onto the estimated transit time. The reason for this is that the appointment clerk at the terminal won’t schedule appointments with the consignee until they confirm that the freight is actually, physically at the destination terminal. In some cases, like when freight is delivering to a residence, appointments are always required.

Although a delayed shipment is never not frustrating, we at FreightPros are always striving to make your lives easier. Our team runs a Delivery Report daily to check on shipments that are running late and follow-up with carriers to see why. We then do everything in our power to get shipments delivered as quickly as possible! Our goal is to provide a quality freight experience, and education is the first step to achieving that!