Bakkie Hire Tips
For those global readers out there, the term ‘bakkie’ is the South African vernacular for a light delivery vehicle, something similar to what Americans may call a ‘pick-up’.
A bakkie is synonymous with South African culture, and people use them for personal, recreational or industrial use. Many South Africans look to rent a bakkie to take the family on a camping trip or to move freight for their business, others tend to rent a bakkie for long periods of time.
People looking to rent a bakkie in South Africa are confronted with many challenges, the bakkie rental industry is, unfortunately, not the simplest of roads to navigate. How is this?
Well, the majority of bakkie hire companies in South Africa started out during the ’60s with a handful of bakkies and drivers to deliver the best rental service to individuals and/or businesses that needed to rent a bakkie.
What’s different today? The very same bakkie rentals that started out in the ’60s with a focus on service delivery to anyone looking to rent a bakkie have become large multi-national organizations that bid for multi-million rand tenders. The result is a shift in focus from delivering a quality service to individuals, toward a more corporate-aligned effort.
What does this mean? These large bakkie rental companies no longer care to do business with individuals looking to rent a bakkie for the day, and understandably so…But this result leaves the individual consumer who is looking to rent a bakkie, between a rock and hard place.
So, we have compiled a 5 step guide for individual consumers to consider when navigating the bakkie rental maze. Hopefully, this can help consumers identify a sour deal when confronted with one.
- Be aware of your needs, if you’re looking to rent a bakkie, then be sure to know how long you need it for and how many km you need to travel, this will substantially affect the price.
- Be knowledgeable of the capacity and payload of your bakkie, most bakkies carry a maximum of 1 ton and be aware that your 1 ton of goods may have too much mass to be able to safely fit onto the back of your bakkie.
- Scrutinize your quotation, many bakkie rental companies today tend to produce extremely complicated quotations, so be aware of what you are in for. Also, understand the liability of your contract, who’s responsible for insurance excess etc.
- Understand your inclusions and exclusions of your contract, many bakkie rental companies today tend to conveniently hide facts and figures from the untrained eye.
- Compare quotations! Don’t just accept the first offer based on the urgency to rent a bakkie.
So there you have it, hopefully, this can help simplify and secure the process involved with renting a bakkie.
Our job is to simplify the vehicle rental market in South Africa and make it accessible to individual consumers again.
For more information about our bakkie hire service, please visit www.dialatruck.co.za or give us a call on 0861 998 887.
