Why We Don't Have Customer Collections

One of the most frequent questions we get asked at Expo Hire is why we do not offer a customer collection service for event hire orders. It’s a service that is offered by a large number of other companies in the event hire industry to help customers to reduce the cost of their order.

We’ve put this blog post together to help explain why we don’t offer customer collection and why it’s almost certainly in a customer’s best interests to have their event hire order delivered.

Damages to event hire orders in transit

One of the biggest reasons we do not offer customer collections is the chance of damage of items in transit is far greater if a customer collects their order than if one of our drivers delivers it.

Delivering event hire can be tricky, especially when there is large amounts of equipment and furniture to be dispatched. Our drivers have lots of experience in loading and unloading their vans and have got to a point when they instinctively know how to load their van to be safe and balanced. The vans they drive have been picked specifically to be tall enough and long enough to deal with the products we offer.

Contrast that with a customer loading equipment or furniture into their own vehicle. While some of our customers do have access to the right vehicles, our experience is that these customers are in the minority. Having seen customers in the past turn up to collect banqueting tables in small hatchbacks with no idea how one would get into the other, it’s not hard to understand why we decided customer collections were a bad idea.

Even smaller items like crockery and glassware can be an issue. While boxes and crates can fit into smaller vehicles much more easily than large furniture, there can still be issues if these move around while the vehicle is in motion. One can only imagine the horror that would be felt on arrival home to find all the glassware in a crate had been damaged during the journey.

Insurance issues

A factor that is often overlooked with regards to customer collections is one of insurance. Many vehicle insurance policies restrict how a vehicle can be used, including the transport of commercial equipment like event hire.

For many people this isn’t an issue as it’s seen as a one-off journey that won’t affect the vehicle; however, this is a somewhat myopic viewpoint. Should a vehicle be involved in an accident or worse stolen while transporting event hire, it’s easily possible that the insurance on the vehicle could be invalidated as the usage of vehicle wasn’t permitted.

We’d hate for anyone to be in this position. Even if a vehicle is covered for the transport of hire equipment, it’s an additional stress for anyone to deal with replacing hire equipment that has been broken or stolen on top of fixing their vehicle.

False Economy

The final reason we don’t have customer collections of event hire orders is because it’s our experience that they’re a false economy. While it might seem cheaper to not pay a carriage charge for an event hire order, the fact is that there is going to be an expense in collecting it both in financial terms and time.

As an online company, we do not have showrooms or customer facilities at our warehouses. We don’t have staff whose specific job would be to deal with customers, and to employ those staff for collections would be another cost to factor into our hire charges, potentially pushing them up.

With carriage charges as low as just £20 plus VAT and tracking available for all deliveries, it’s much easier to let us deal with all of the stress of loading and unloading vans as well as getting your order to you in the best possible condition.