Next day deliveries have become very common recently and to fill that demand van couriers have stepped up to the plate.
They get the packages from a central depot and then spend their days and nights driving all around the UK, making sure consumers get the goods they have paid for.
Sometimes they have to “leave the package behind the gate” or “drop it off at Mr Smith’s next door,” but most of the time they put it into the hands of the person it was intended for.
Of course, as regular readers of this blog will be well aware of…self employed van couriers may very well soon be of a robotic nature, but for now the industry is very much human.
Especially as Christmas is only a few weeks away and those packages need delivering more than at any other time of the year. In fact, many people decide to become van couriers for a month or two to fill the demand for delivering packages at this time of year, but there is one thing that many of them are not aware of.
“A man or woman with a van required” is often the headline in a job advert for temporary van couriers, where they are expected to use their own van in a self employed manner.
However, what the job adverts mostly do not state is that anybody working as a van courier requires specialist courier insurance in order to have full coverage, both for their van and any packages that are riding along in the back.
Many couriers wrongfully believe that normal van insurance will be sufficient or that the company they are doing deliveries for will cover them if anything goes wrong. This is far from the truth.
The reality is that if you don’t sort out courier insurance for yourself then it’s you that is liable in the event of an accident or lost packages.
In other words, if you are transporting the latest LCD TV to Mrs Jones and someone crashes into the back of your van sending the TV crashing to the floor…then it is you that is going to pay Mrs Jones for the TV. It could be thousands of pounds, think about that for a minute.
Let’s not forget that Christmas is the season for thieves, and there is nothing they like better than a van full of packages. A team of thugs are in and out of your van faster than you can say “Dude, where are the packages?” and then they are gone.
In this kind of situation you could very well be responsible for a whole van full of packages, which might be worth many thousands of pounds.
That is why I advise everybody to get courier insurance immediately, and use a comparison website like this one to find cheap prices.