Route tabs and new-load alerts

Opening the load board every morning and rebuilding the same filters is the most tedious and least useful time a carrier spends. Your lane is known: say, Turkey to Germany, Poland and Romania. Instead of searching each time, you set that lane up once.

What is a route tab?

A route tab is a saved lane made of one origin country and up to 10 destination countries. Open the tab and you see only loads that match that lane. You can set up several tabs, for example one for the western lane and one for the Balkans.

It works together with the board filters: loading and delivery country, date, vehicle type and body type. Spot listings, auctions (tenders) and part loads are in the same place, so inside a tab you see all of them together.

New-load alerts

The really useful part of a tab is the alert: you are notified when a new matching load lands on the lane. In a market where the first good offer has the advantage, seeing the load ten minutes later rather than in the evening often makes the difference.

A few tips:

• Keep the tab to the lanes you actually run. You do not have to fill all 10 countries; a wide tab turns alerts into noise.
• Add vehicle and body type filters so curtainsider listings do not reach your reefer.
• When an alert arrives, read the whole listing; if something is missing, ask in the chat before offering. For what a good listing should contain, see how to write a load listing.

Backhauls: ranked by detour

Empty return is one of a carrier's biggest cost items. If your truck unloads in Germany and heads home to Turkey, a load on your way brings the empty kilometres close to free; but a load that pulls you far off your route is no longer profit, it is cost.

That is why backhaul search is ranked by vehicle position and by how far the load takes you off your route. The detour is shown in kilometres, so you can weigh how far you leave your main road to reach the load. The loads that fit your way with the least detour come first.

The smallest detour alone is not enough; you still weigh price, date, loading time and payment term together. We covered wider ways to cut empty running in empty return trips.

In daily use

When you start work in the morning, you look at your tab: the loads that landed overnight are there. If an alert comes in during the day, you open just that listing and assess it quickly. If your lane changes, say you are heading to another country for seasonal work, you edit the tab or open a new one. The board stops being a search page and becomes a short summary of the lane you run.

Which lanes belong in a tab?

Make your busiest lane and your most-empty return lane separate tabs. The first works for outbound jobs, the second for suggestions on the way back based on your vehicle position. Because trucks returning through the same countries may unload in different regions, choose the countries in your return tab by the route your trucks really take. For seasonal lanes, opening a separate tab and closing it when the season ends keeps you tidy.

In short

A route tab lets you set the search up once, the alert keeps you from missing the load, and detour ranking puts what fits your road first. Short definitions of the terms are in the Freight Glossary.