61 Pallets, One CBD Hotel, and a 3.6 Metre Ceiling
Two 40ft containers off the port, unpacked, repacked, stored for a week, then delivered into the city six pallets at a time.
Two 40ft containers of bed linen and towels landed from China, headed for a five-star hotel in the Brisbane CBD. We collected them off the port, unpacked them overnight, and ended up with 61 pallets.
Then two things made it a genuinely interesting job. The hotel’s loading dock has 3.6 metres of clearance. And the hotel was mid-renovation, so nothing could be delivered for a week.
One Company, Start to Finish
This job touched five different services. On most import jobs that means five different suppliers, five invoices, and five opportunities for someone to blame someone else. Here it was all us.
One point of contact, one company accountable for the whole chain. When the hotel’s renovation timeline moved, we didn’t have to renegotiate with a warehouse operator and a transport company separately. We just held the freight.
Off the Port, Into the Warehouse
A 40ft container gets packed floor to ceiling at the factory. Nothing inside is on a pallet, because pallets eat the space you’ve just paid for. So before anything can move, it all comes out by hand and goes back onto pallets a forklift can actually pick up.
That’s devanning. And the sooner it happens the better — containers sitting around waiting cost money every single day they’re not back with the shipping line. We picked both up off the port and had them emptied on our own site, working into the night.
Where the Client Saved Money: 36 Pallets Became 27
One of the two containers arrived already palletised. The supplier had built 36 pallets before it shipped — nothing wrong with the work, it just wasn’t built for what happens at this end.
We pulled them apart and rebuilt them. Same goods, tighter stacks, better use of the footprint. 36 pallets came back out as 27.
Nine fewer pallets is a run and a half off the delivery schedule, and nine pallet spaces the client isn’t paying to store for a week. On light, bulky freight like linen, how the pallet gets built is most of the cost.
This is the sort of thing you only catch if the same crew doing the unpacking is also the crew doing the delivery. A warehouse that just stores what it’s given has no reason to rebuild anything. We rebuild because we’re the ones who have to move it — and because the client pays by the pallet.
A Week in Storage, Because the Hotel Wasn’t Ready
The hotel was still mid-renovation. The rooms the linen was going into didn’t exist yet in any usable form, and there was nowhere on site to park 61 pallets while they got finished.
So the freight stayed with us for a week. Wrapped, labelled, racked, and out of everyone’s way. The alternative — leaving goods in containers, or paying port storage, or trying to squeeze pallets into a building full of tradies — is expensive in every direction.
Renovation timelines move. Ours is the kind of storage that moves with them, because we’re not renting the space out from under you the moment your date slips.
Then the 3.6 Metre Problem
Every instinct in freight says send the biggest truck you can. Fewer runs, less labour, cheaper for everyone. With 61 pallets on the floor, a 10-pallet truck is the obvious answer.
Only a 10-pallet truck doesn’t fit under 3.6 metres. Neither does most of what a general freight operator would roll out for a job this size. And a truck that can’t get into the dock isn’t a small inconvenience — it’s a loaded vehicle on a city street with nowhere to unload, a driver on the clock, and a hotel that still hasn’t got its linen.
A six-pallet truck with a hydraulic tail-lift.
It fits. Comfortably under the 3.6 metre clearance, into the dock, out again without holding anyone up.
It unloads itself. The tail-lift brings pallets down under power, so the job doesn’t depend on what equipment the hotel has free that morning.
The trade-off is obvious: six pallets a run instead of ten means more trips. We wear that. It’s the difference between a delivery plan that works and one that looks good on a quote and falls apart on the day.
Why Small Trucks Win in the CBD
How the Job Actually Ran
The Bit Most Operators Get Wrong
Plenty of freight companies will quote a job like this off two numbers: how many pallets, and how far. Both are easy to get over the phone. Neither tells you whether the truck can physically get in, or whether those pallets are built the way they should be.
Nobody finds out until delivery day, and by then every option is a bad one — send it back, unload onto the footpath, or start ringing around for a smaller truck while the driver waits.
Asking about clearance takes thirty seconds. Rebuilding 36 pallets into 27 takes a few hours and saves the client money every time we deliver. Neither is complicated. Both just require someone who’s thinking about the whole job instead of their one slice of it.
Sound Familiar?
Hotels are the obvious case, but this shape of problem turns up everywhere across Brisbane and South East Queensland.
The Point of the Exercise
The hotel never needed to hear the words devanning, demurrage or dock clearance. They needed linen in the right rooms on the right days, without paying for problems nobody warned them about. Everything in between was our job to solve.
Container Coming Into Brisbane?
Port pickup, container unpacking, repacking, warehouse storage and staged tail-lift delivery. One company, one invoice, one number to call.
Tell us what’s landing and where it’s going — including the clearance height.
Get a Quoteor call 0422 962 193
77 Freight Transport — Underwood QLD 4119 | Serving Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Byron Bay to Gympie