In my experience, no carrier WANTS to bond anything. It is a huge drain on time and resources.
Absolutely.
First; it's a bunch of phone calls to the customs broker to egg them on to do their jobs in a timely manner. Put up with horrible on hold music, leave messages that are not returned etc, etc.
Second, a number of phone calls to the customer / freight broker. A select few have enough information to get something done. Otherwise, you get a freight broker who doesn't know what is involved or how to fix it, if you get a hold of anyone at all.
Third, you're at the border and you decide you've had enough with the phone calls, the inability for anyone who should be able to do something, to do anything; its best to make your move because now it could happen at any time or not until a week of Sundays - slam it in bond. You have change the ACI manifest which is usually a delete and a resubmit. Then technically you have to wait a full hour or AMPS penalties will apply for arriving in under an hour after submission approval. Heaven forbid it if the broker finally gets it done at this point.
Fourth; bring it into your yard and start planning on getting it to a bond shed instead of the final destination. This causes a horrible domino effect for all your other planning that you meticulously completed to ensure all deliveries and pickups are done on time with appointments and such but this PITA ends up screwing everything.
Fifth; manage to advise the customs broker to let them know that the shipment went in bond and now they have to make the transaction for an inland port instead of the original intended port. Unless you get to speak to a supervisor, that gets all messed up because the people on the front lines have no clue what that means. (just like a few of you reading this I bet)
Sixth; get to the bond shed with all the paperwork, have it arrived by the bond shed and if the transaction is still not done the bond shed charges to unload you but you have to pay up front. If it is done you have to pay the bond fees then before leaving. Now you have to plan how to get this in the pickup/delivery mix.
Seventh; call the freight broker and tell them they owe $XXX.00 for all the time and hassle to which you get told, 'MY CUSTOMER DOES NOT APPROVE'. Now we have done the equivalent of anywhere from 1-6 hours of administrative work plus costs for extra deliveries and redeliveries.
All this happens because the shipper and the receiver have agreed to a transaction to buy or sell something, and neither of them has any idea or clue on ensuring that the paperwork to get it over the border is complete and that their customs broker can handle it. Last week we took a Canadian Tire shipment from the US. They use Livingston (arrrggg). The process there is that Livingston has to get approval from CTC to do the entry. Here the shipper and receiver knew the product was shipping but nobody approved it to Livingston and we waited at the border until someone, either Livingston or CTC was able to reply to an email. We are not going to get anything for the wait at the border or the bond or the 40 odd phone calls to Livingston because this freight broker is an
[fill in the blank].
If you told me up front that the shipment was coming in bond we could arrange something much more cost effective but since most freight brokers know nothing about their customers freight the above gets handled by the carrier. Remember this is not about cost reimbursement. This is about providing a service that was not originally planned but managed because other people didn't.
In this original post the charge was $1600 bond + $300 redelivery. Is that excessive? Maybe. That all depends on the business relationship between the carrier and the freight broker. It certainly sounds like there was no previous or ongoing expected business relationship between the carrier and the freight broker. Nobody is telling the whole story here and we don't know if it sat in bond for days and incurred storage or did it take hours on end to get it resolved. IMO, it sounds like somewhere in this whole process the carrier demanded some punitive amount because of the hassle. It makes me wish I didthe same in the CTC example I gave earlier.
To sum up the post, if you're a freight broker, don't take a chance on letting the carrier make the decision. Do the work yourself and charge the customer accordingly. Get the paperwork, follow up with the customs broker, get the work done before the carrier does it for you and charge you for it.
