We have been helping arrange motorcycle shipping services for thousands of customers since 1999. We try very hard to educate our customers about the process involved in scheduling a motorcycle shipment prior to a customer making a commitment to ship their bike.
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The way shipment scheduling happens varies from one motorcycle shipper to another.
In general, most motorcycle moving companies have customers fill out a booking form. This form will contain the origin and destination locations, it will also note the origin and destination points of contact along with the phone numbers for those points of contact. Additionally, the form will have information noted about the bike such as the year, make, model and VIN number. When the motorcycle transit company has all the shipment details they will set up a preliminary schedule and provide an estimated range of days for pick up and for delivery after pick up.
Motorcycle transporters generally meet their schedule estimates but they don’t guaranty their time frame estimates because there are many factors that can affect pick up and delivery schedules. Some of the factors that can affect the schedule include the actual pick up and delivery location, weather, road conditions, traffic conditions, DOT driving limits, mechanical failures, prior and en-route bookings, point of contact availability, etc. Bike shippers need to combine as many motorcycle shipments together as possible on each run in order to optimize the available space on their truck and to be able to keep shipping rates as low as possible. The more bikes on a given truck the longer it will usually take for pick up and for delivery after pick up. It’s best to be as patient as possible when shipping a motorcycle, scheduling is not an exact science.
Some motorcycle movers only service a certain regional areas of the country and they only operate in those area of the country, they do not travel outside of those regions. When that is the case they usually make runs through that regional area every couple of weeks. Shipment scheduling with smaller regional motorcycle carriers is usually easier because they handle shipments in those regions on a regular basis. Additionally, their time frames are usually faster than the nationwide motorcycle transporters schedules.
Nationwide motorcycle carriers usually use much larger trucks than the regional transporters do. As such, the nationwide transporters can hold significantly more motorcycles on their trucks than a regional transporter can. A number of nationwide transporters use full size 18 wheelers to transport motorcycles. Many of these 18 wheeler rigs utilize a double decker trailer arrangement. These types of shipping trucks usually have lift gates for loading and unloading the motorcycles on and off of their truck. They can sometimes fit as many as 30 to 35 motorcycles on a truck when configured as a double decker. When you consider how many stops one truck needs to make on a given route you can see why coast to coast transportation usually takes longer from pick up to delivery than most of the regional transporters do. In some cases, one truck may make as many as 70 stops from the pick up location to the delivery location. Each stop adds extra time to a transporters schedule and we do our best to reflect those extra time requirements in our quotes on long distance motorcycle shipments.