Whether your firm exports machinery, electronics, car parts or clothing, the chances are that palletising deliveries will be the most cost-effective way of getting orders to European customers from the UK. This is certainly the case with Poland which is most easily reached from the British Isles via ports in western Europe, such as Dunkirk, Zeebrugge, Hook of Holland or Calais. From any of those locations, it would typically take under 11 hours of continual driving to reach the Oder River, the watercourse that serves as much of the international border between Germany and Poland.
Of course, under EU law, drivers are not allowed to keep driving on and on without stopping. Although the motorway network between France and Poland – much of which is in Germany – is very well maintained, commercial drivers of vans and lorries are rightly monitored to ensure they comply with the rules which, in essence, means taking mandatory rest breaks. According to one British freight forwarding company, Barrington Freight, a good way to keep pallets on their way to Poland with fewer interruptions is to send a two-driver team. This way, when one driver needs to stop, the other one can take over.
As such, express pallet to Poland from the UK with courier drivers could be a viable alternative to air freight for most types of palletised goods. It is certainly much cheaper to arrange for an express courier service to Poland than to rely on air freight. What’s more, air freighted cargo still needs to have its onward transit arranged from Warsaw, Krakow or wherever else it has touched down. With a courier handling your pallet delivery to Poland, on the other hand, you can entrust the driver(s) to take your goods directly to your customer’s goods-in area. This often makes palletised road freight not only cheaper but more secure than the alternatives, too.
Of course, urgent deliveries to Poland are not always needed. If so, order fulfilment could be a great deal less expensive if you were to place your pallet into a groupage shipment. Typically, freight forwarders arrange these when they have multiple pallets heading to similar parts of the country, such as Lublin in the east or Szczecin in the west, not that far from Berlin.
Under this sort of commercial arrangement, you will still get a door-to-door service from the UK to anywhere in Poland but the fuel and labour costs will be shared. Offering great value for money, groupage shipments of palletised goods are the ideal choice when you don’t have to worry about meeting a particular deadline your Polish customer might have set. In short, they make British exporting firms more competitive when delivering to clients in locations that are well over 600 miles by road from Dover.
In the end, it will come down to what the priorities of your Polish customers are and what they are willing to pay for. The point to take on board is that there are some great options for British companies that want to keep trading in Poland in the post-Brexit business environment.