Fast & Affordable Trucking Service is a common ground between air freight, and sea freight.

Torn between speed, and cheaper freight? Go for trucking service where getting both are combined as an alternative option.

Shipping goods within the Philippines can become a major challenge to anyone including experts in the industry, mainly because the environment is changing and requires using complex modes or means of transportation by land, sea, or air freight. The quarantine protocols change from time to time, thus the need for quick ability to adjust is very important.

When time is of the essence due to the nature of the cargo, cargoes are shipped using air freight, but when saving cost is the priority, sea freight becomes the top choice of many shippers because it is reasonably cheaper than air freight.

In the Philippines where consumers demand speed and cheaper options, we always ask ourselves “how do we make speed and cheap happen at once?”.

With more than ten years of experience in logistics, we are sharing with you our wisdom and give you ideas or tips on how to find the balance between speed, and moving it cheaply.

Tip #1: Always plan ahead of time.

As the saying goes “we can only be as strong as our weakest link”, this goes true even to the supply chain. In other words, ensuring efficiency is not only the sole responsibility of your service provider. The customer also plays an important role by planning proper inventory management, coordinating transport from production to last mile, these are all crucial to the success of the entire delivery. 

Done correctly, it will be easier to determine which mode of transportation for your cargo is best, be it by sea, air freight, or inland freight and either by full-truck or less-truck-load services.

Tip #2: Use sea freight but only when lead time is forgiving.

There is no doubt that sea freight is one of the cheapest options to move cargo across the archipelago. This is because ship operations leverage on its ability to move cargoes in gigantic quantities compared to air and inland freight. But just like any other option, there will always be a trade off and that is speed, hence only use sea freight when lead time permits.

Tip #3: Move cargoes to Visayas and Mindanao using trucking solutions 

Inland freight solutions are transport services designed to move cargoes such as a balikbayan box, items from an online shop or ecommerce business, or those moved through courier services, from one place to another by land, and sometimes in combination with roll-on/roll-off vessels.

Tip #4: A trucking service that you only pay based on the weight of your cargo.

A trucking service has two main categories that apply to various markets or needs. These are full truckload and less than truckload.

When shippers pay for the entire space of a truck, either fully used or not, it is called full truckload. Meanwhile, less than truckload happens when shippers pay only for the space used by their cargoes. These shippers pay per cubic meter (cbm), or often by weight using kilo (kg) as the unit of measure.

Businesses or private individuals who cannot fill an entire truckload, consider doing less than truckload as it is relatively cheaper or reasonable to pay only for the space or weight of your cargo.

Tip #5: Air freight is best for time-sensitive, and expensive cargo. Use trucking service as a good alternative.

This pandemic is a disaster to the airline industry that forced airline operators to recover their lost sales by increasing air freight rates. This is just one of the reasons why cargo rates have significantly jumped since the beginning COVID-19, with no normalization in sight.

Hence, treat trucking as a good alternative to air freight that balances speed, and costs since travel time to the Visayas from actual departure may only take about 1-2 days and about 2-3 days to Mindanao, considering all travel factors are favorable. 

Do you find this article helpful? If you need more information that will help you decide, please check Ernest Logistics Corporation. We are a domestic and international logistics company that specializes in air, sea, and land transportation.