Shippers who like the convenience and price of Delta Air Lines’ door-to-door, cross-country shipping service can now send heavier packages.
Delta (NYSE: DAL) teamed in late October with on-demand delivery company Roadie to launch the service for time-critical goods such as medical equipment, fresh flowers, and automotive and industrial parts. It was the first U.S. passenger airline to offer turnkey, 24/7 pickup and delivery service in a segment already covered well by courier services.
The DASH Door-to-Door product covers packages less than 100 pounds and 90 linear inches. Delta Cargo says it has included the DASH Heavy product with Door-to-Door, allowing customers to ship packages between 101 and 300 pounds or between 90 volumetric inches up to the maximum size that will fit on the aircraft per piece for loose shipments.
“The expansion in DASH is a direct result of customer feedback as we received a number of requests to transport large shipments from both new Door-to-Door customers and existing DASH Heavy customers. It was a natural next step in the product roadmap with Roadie,” Delta spokeswoman Aimee Greaves said in an email.
The service is now available in more than 60 cities, five more than when it started. At the time, Delta said it planned to expand to dozens more cities by the end of 2019.
Roadie began operating in 2015 as a gig delivery company, matching one-way, same-day delivery with drivers using their personal vehicles to make deliveries on routes they were already traveling. Started as a consumer-to-consumer service, Roadie now handles deliveries from businesses such as Walmart and Home Depot too.
The difference between DASH Door-to-Door and other services is that it only requires one tender for end-to-end movement. A shipper generally needs to make separate requests for the carrier, the pickup agent on the front end and the delivery agent on the back end.
However, national and regional courier services provide the same next-flight-out delivery capability, and the benefit is that couriers can take advantage of direct flights by working with multiple airlines. Delta doesn’t fly direct to all destinations from all origins. A national courier can also arrange for pickup and delivery with a single transaction.
Customers can book DASH Door-to-Door on deltacargo.com and get a dynamic price quote with a single booking for flights with pickup/delivery, as well as end-to-end tracking and real-time status updates. Roadie drivers are approved by the Transportation Security Administration. Roadie says it has 150,000 registered drivers, but only those prescreened by the TSA will participate in the program.
“We ship architectural goods and love that we can do all bookings online and get shipments picked up at our facility,” Cheryl Tanner at Bruce Wall Systems Corp. is quoted as saying in Delta’s press release. “We used to pay much more to get shipments out, but since we started using DASH Door-to-Door, we’ve saved a lot of money.”