When you hand your parcel over to a courier for delivery, what happens behind the scenes?
Regardless of whether the destination is domestic or international, when you send a parcel via courier, you want to rest assured that it is in safe hands.
But, once you have handed it over to your courier service, what happens behind the scenes to ensure that your parcel arrives safely from point A to point B?
Efficiency is part and parcel
Part and parcel of what a courier service aims to do is to be as efficient as possible. Yet, there are a number of steps involved in the process.
To a sender, it may seem as though all a courier actually does is collect a parcel from one place and take it to another – a simple chain of events, right? Yet, the process is a little more complicated than one would expect.
The first step is an obvious one. When you book a courier service your courier will collect the parcel from you from a specific address which could either be your home, office or another drop-off location.
Domestic parcels
From there, along with hundreds of others collected that same day, your parcel will then be taken to the nearest depot.
At the depot, your parcel will be sorted together with others that have been addressed to a similar location. Often, a parcel will be sent to another depot located closer to the delivery location, where it is then assigned to a driver based in that particular area of coverage for final delivery.
International parcels
If the parcel is intended for an international destination, from the depot it will be delivered to the nearest airport and transported via air and once it arrives in the destination country is again sorted with other parcels according to similar location criteria. The parcel is then taken to another depot close to the destination, and as with local deliveries is then assigned to a driver who then makes the final delivery.