Can I send skids to several cities on one booking?

Yes — this is what multi-stop service is for. If you have skids for customers in three different cities, you don’t need three couriers; you need one vehicle, loaded once, running a planned route. Book the whole run as one shipment, and each destination becomes a stop with its own paperwork and its own proof of delivery.

For GTA and Southern Ontario shippers, this is one of the most useful patterns in regional freight: a wholesaler dropping orders in Burlington, Hamilton and Niagara on one afternoon, or a manufacturer feeding dealers in Guelph, Kitchener–Waterloo and London off a single morning departure.

How a multi-stop skid run works

The mechanics, start to finish:

1. You list every stop at booking — each address, its receiving contact and hours, and which skids belong to it.
2. The carrier sizes the vehicle to the whole load, not the biggest single drop. Five skids across three cities need a truck that carries five skids, with tailgates at any stop that lacks a dock.
3. The route is sequenced, usually by geography and receiving windows — and the truck is loaded in reverse: last stop’s freight deepest, first stop’s freight at the door.
4. The driver runs the route, delivering each stop’s skids against its paperwork.
5. Each stop closes with its own POD — signature, time, piece count — so you have per-destination confirmation, not one signature standing in for three deliveries.

That per-stop paperwork matters more than it sounds. When each delivery is a separate line in the record, a question from any one customer — what arrived, when, who signed — has its own answer.

What the carrier needs from you

Multi-stop runs live or die on the accuracy of the stop list. For each destination, have ready:

• Address and receiving contact, with a direct way to reach them
• Receiving hours and any appointment requirements — one stop with a narrow window can dictate the whole route’s timing
• Which freight goes there — skid count, dimensions and weight per stop, labelled to match
• Dock or no dock — any stop without one needs the tailgate flagged in advance

Label every skid with its destination clearly. On a single-drop shipment, ambiguity is an inconvenience; on a multi-stop run, an unlabelled skid is how the Cambridge freight ends up in London. The pallet-prep discipline is the same as any skid shipment — covered fully in how to ship a skid across the GTA — applied once per destination.

When one booking beats three

Multi-stop wins when the destinations lie in the same general direction and the deadlines are compatible. One vehicle running Mississauga → Hamilton → Cambridge → London does the work of three separate bookings with one load-out, one carrier relationship and one coordinated schedule. It’s also operationally cleaner at your dock: staff stage one shipment, meet one truck, hand over one set of paperwork.

Separate bookings win when deadlines collide. A multi-stop route is sequential — somebody is the last stop. If the London skid must arrive at the same hour as the Hamilton skid, one vehicle can’t be in both places, and the honest answer is two direct runs. The decision logic between spreading freight across a route and committing a vehicle to one mission is exactly what we unpack in do I need dedicated or multi-stop service.

Vehicle choice shifts with the pattern too — a many-stop route of light freight suits a Sprinter, while a few heavy drops need the box truck. The trade-offs are laid out in choosing the right vehicle size for a shipment.

Where multi-stop fits among services

Multi-stop routing is a shape, not a separate service — it runs within same-day direct service when the route completes inside a business day, which is the normal case for stops across the GTA and Golden Horseshoe. A repeating multi-stop pattern — the same three cities every Tuesday — usually graduates into a scheduled route, where the stops and sequence are standing arrangements rather than fresh bookings. And the general mechanics of stops on a single run, beyond skids specifically, are covered in can I book multiple stops.

What you see while the run is out

A multi-stop run doesn’t go quiet between departure and the last drop. As stops complete, PODs come back per destination — who signed, when, and the piece count received — so you can update each customer individually rather than waiting for the whole route to finish. If something changes mid-route — a receiver calls to push their window, a dock backs up — dispatch and the driver adjust the remaining sequence where geography allows, and you hear about it rather than discovering it. The practical habit worth building on your side: give the carrier a contact who can make decisions during the run, because a two-minute phone answer (“deliver to the side door instead”) keeps a route moving where silence stalls it.

Skids and pallets are roughly 60% of what Sonic Transport moves, and a good share of that freight travels exactly this way — one dock, one truck, several cities. If you have skids headed to more than one destination, send us the stop list and we’ll quote the whole route as one run, sequence it sensibly, and close every stop with its own POD.