What Is the Best Type of Transportation for Me?

What is the best type of transportation for me?

The majority of the Mexican companies that decided to enter the foreign market, initially they faced many questions about how to do it, and one of them is the type of transport that they should use to ship their products. Currently, there are three types of transportation used in international trade and one more that is a combination of two or more of them. They are the land transport, sea transport and air transport. To choose the type of transport should be considered several factors, some of them are: the type of load that will be moved, the volume and weight of the good, the route that the load should follow, safety, cost of freight service, among many other factors. But the three most important factors to consider are: load type, volume and weight of the load and route to be followed. In this essay you can see a comparison among different types of transport with respect to the above factors to select the perfect transportation.

By type of load we mean: the characteristics of products that will be shipped, their nature, their care and their economic value. The cargo moving by air are high value products such as technology products, perishable goods, urgent goods (products that need to arrive at a certain time) and goods that require a special care, such as pieces of art. Instead the cargo moving by land is of medium and low economic value, not urgent goods and of little brittleness. While the maritime transport moves goods of low economic value, not urgent and not brittle.

The volume and weight of the load determine the space required to send it. Depending on the size of the products is must choose the type of transport. For high weight and high volume loads, maritime transport is the most appropriate. Unlike air transport which carries cargo of low weight and low volume, while land transport carries loads of medium volume and middle-weight.

The route of the goods is very important for the choice of transport because it determines the time and distance that the goods must travel to their final destination. Maritime transport handles very long transit times because its transport equipment is very slow and it has very strict departure dates. In contrast, in air transport, the transit times are too short and it has departure dates variables. Whereas the transit times and frequency of departure of land transport are very variable.

Although there are a lot of factors that may influence us to make the decision about which type of transportation is the most appropriate, the comparison of these three factors are decisive for the products to be exported or imported can arrive in optimal conditions at their destination. For this reason, as a professional of international trade, I recommend to companies and individuals interested in entering to foreign market, analyzing these factors that will greatly assist in the process of internationalization.