Ltl: Less Than Truckload Service

If your Chicago courier service has a trucking division on top of their regular package delivery service, then you are almost assuredly going to be offered LTL service at one point in time. There are a lot of advantages to LTL service. There are also a lot of situations where it is going to be the most ideal type of shipping service that you can hire. That is why it pays to learn a little bit about what less than truckload service is, and why it might be a good choice for you.

The reason that so many people opt to use less than truckload services is because of the cost. When you are shipping anything that falls into the weight range that is served by this type of delivery, LTL shipping is almost always going to be the most cost effective. This is because the entire principle of this type of shipping is built on sharing. This means sharing the space that is available in a truck, as well as sharing the costs of a given shipment.

In an LTL shipment, the trucking company finds people that need to ship their products along a similar route. For instance, the Chicago trucking company probably has many people that need to ship to New York. So, they find enough people to fill up an entire truck with their small shipments. Usually, LTL shipments would all be too small to warrant their own truck, but too large to be included in standardized delivery vehicles. This includes just about everything between 100 and 10,000 lbs. Then, when they have filled up the truck with several clients' packages, they can send the shipment away.

The opposite of LTL service is called FTL. This means full truck load, and it is when a single client hires a truck and is the only one that ships anything within it. This is something that is done most commonly by people with shipments large enough to fill a whole truck, but there are exceptions. These usually happen when LTL shippers become concerned with speed.

LTL shipments are still quite fast, and most people should be more than satisfied with the speed of shipping. However, the reality is that there are several deliveries that need to be made on one shipment. If yours happens to be scheduled as the last drop off, delivery will be slower than an FTL shipment would be.