LTL Freight is What Exactly?
When you talk about different types of load and its transportation, there are several different terms that you need to get your head around as part of the freight business. One of these is LTL freight, so what is it, exactly?
Well, LTL actually stands for Less than Truck Load, which means it refers to a partial load area taken up in a truck’s total load space. To put into more simple terms, if you imagine a trucks load area to be an oblong box, which it pretty much is, and divide it into four, one fourth of that area would be referred to as an area of LTL freight, because it only takes up that fraction of the oblong box. If you took the whole oblong and used all of the space for one consignment of cargo, then it would be a full truckload (FTL).
When a transportation company offers an LTL freight facility, it means that individuals or small businesses can hire a portion of a trucks load space for their own smaller consignment of goods, for which the cost of a full truckload might not be cost effective. In this case, making use of the cheaper tariff of an LTL freight, the customer will save money and be able to send their goods at the best possible price.
So its really about saving money by making the best use of the available space on a truck. For the transportation company, they will arrange several consignments of cargo that are scheduled to go to the same destination to be loaded onto one truck and thereby save on the cost of transporting each load separately.
That’s pretty much how it works, in a nutshell. Of course, the logistics that go into calculating the available load space against the different sizes or volumes of the various consignments that have to be delivered is a job for a logistics professional, but that’s why transportation companies are able to provide this service to their customers and continue to be profitable and retain their value for money to the customer.
