Not everyone gets a quiet summer.
Summer might seem like the cucumber, silly or porky-pie period, when business and news slows down and everyone seems to be on holiday, but looks are deceiving. In road transport, that name has never been more misleading: the demand is high and offer low. While offices empty out and inboxes go quiet, the roads through Europe and especially Spain, Italy, Portugal, and southern France are doing exactly the opposite: they are under enormous pressure.
Goods need to move fast to supply the cities, holidaymakers and the factories. Production has in some cases slowed down a bit but supply chains need to be flowing nevertheless. Road transport companies are facing shortages in drivers, dense traffic situations and road blocks due to fires. The result is a squeeze that catches many shippers off guard, year after year.
Especially hazardous goods, critical shipments in for example the chemical and pharma industries face challenges. Delays disrupt and jeopardize the quality of the goods.
Where the pressure comes from.
A few things happen at the same time, and together they create a real bottleneck.
In Southern Europe it is the harvest season for fresh produce. Tomatoes, melons, stone fruit, all of it needs to move quickly, and refrigerated capacity gets booked up fast. On top of that, driving bans during the hottest weekends in France, Spain, and Italy restrict when trucks are even allowed on the road, so the available hours shrink while the demand grows.
Add to that a wave of driver holidays across the whole continent, and you get fewer trucks, fewer available hours, and more cargo competing for both. Rates go up, transit times stretch, and last-minute bookings become close to impossible.
How to reduce the effect for your business? Please contact team Trasegro. But in all honesty we make magic happen but we are not magicians.
What this means for your planning.
If you ship to, from, or through Southern Europe in July and August, this is not the moment to assume things will run as usual.
Lead times that are normally reliable can suddenly slip. A shipment that took three days in May might take five or six in August, simply because there is no truck available on the day you need one. Costs move too, since carriers price in the scarcity, not just the distance.
The businesses that come through this period smoothly are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones with the earliest bookings and the most flexible plans B and C.
Our approach: plan early, stay flexible.
At Trasegro, we start preparing our clients for the summer squeeze well before the season hits. That means booking capacity in advance where we can, keeping a close eye on alternative routes and partners, and being upfront the moment we see a delay coming rather than after it happens.
Our network across Southern Europe is built on long-term relationships with carriers we trust, which means we usually know where there is still room, even when the market looks fully booked from the outside. That is the value of a strong network: it does not remove the pressure, but it gives you options when others are stuck.
How to reduce the effect for your business? Please contact team Trasegro.
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With a strong focus on personal service and professionalism, Trasegro supports clients in navigating complex logistics challenges with flexible, reliable solutions.
