Almost every delivery that goes wrong went wrong at the booking screen. The load was bigger than it looked in the hallway, the vehicle turned up with half the space it needed, and now two people are standing on a pavement deciding what gets left behind.
Picking a vehicle is not really a guess. It comes down to three questions, asked in order: will it fit, can it be carried, and can the vehicle reach the door. Answer those honestly and the rest of the booking looks after itself.
Start with volume, not weight
People almost always estimate weight and almost never estimate space. For most household and retail loads, space runs out long before weight does — a van hits its ceiling on boxes of bedding well before it hits it on a pallet of tiles. Measure the largest single item, then think in terms of how many of the boxes you have would stack in a bath tub.
- Bike — documents, keys, a phone, food, a single parcel you could carry under one arm. Anything that fits in a courier box on the back of a scooter. Fastest through traffic, and the cheapest way to move something small across a congested city.
- Mini-van — the workhorse. A studio flat's worth of boxes, a two-seater sofa, a washing machine, a week's stock for a small shop. If you are picturing "a few trips in a car", it is one mini-van run.
- Truck — full house moves, pallets, long items that cannot be tilted, anything that needs a tail lift or two people to lift safely. Also the right answer when the load is small but very heavy.
Then ask who is doing the lifting
A vehicle with enough space is still the wrong vehicle if nobody can get the load into it. A washing machine fits in a mini-van easily; getting it down two flights of stairs is a different problem, and it is the one that actually costs time.
If an item needs two people, say so when you book. Your partner arrives knowing what the job is, brings the right straps, and does not spend twenty minutes working out that this was never a one-person load. Nothing slows a delivery down like a surprise at the door.
Finally, check the last fifty metres
The route is the easy part. The difficult part is usually the last fifty metres: a height barrier at the car park entrance, a pedestrianised street with a loading window that closed at ten, a courtyard a truck cannot turn around in.
If either end of your trip has a restriction, size down and take two runs rather than sending a vehicle that has to park five streets away. A mini-van that stops at the door beats a truck that cannot get near it.
When you are between two sizes
Go up. The gap in price between a bike and a mini-van, or between a mini-van and a truck, is almost always smaller than the cost of a second booking — and much smaller than the cost of arriving at a new flat to find half your things are still at the old one.
You will see the fare for each vehicle before you confirm, so the comparison takes a few seconds. Make it, then book the one with room to spare.
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