What the two actually mean
A dedicated vehicle carries your load and nothing else. It leaves when you are ready and drives to your address. You are paying for the whole truck whether you fill it or not.
Groupage means your belongings share space with other consignments heading the same way. You pay for the volume you occupy rather than the vehicle, which is substantially less. In exchange you accept that departure waits for the load to be consolidated, and that there are other stops on the way.
Volume decides most of it
The arithmetic is simple. Below roughly fifteen to twenty cubic metres, paying for a whole truck means paying for a lot of empty air, and groupage almost always wins.
Above thirty-five or forty cubic metres you are close to filling a vehicle anyway, so the saving shrinks while the disadvantages remain. Between those figures it becomes a genuine judgement call, and the deciding factor is usually the calendar rather than the volume.
- Under ~20 m3: groupage, in almost every case
- 20 to 35 m3: depends on your dates and how much delay you can absorb
- Over ~35 m3: a dedicated vehicle is usually the better answer
How fixed are your dates?
This is the question that overrides the volume. If your move is tied to a lease ending, a handover, a school term or a flight, the flexibility groupage requires may simply not exist.
A dedicated truck buys certainty. If you must be out of one property on the fifteenth and into another on the eighteenth, that certainty is worth paying for, and trying to save on it is how people end up paying for storage instead.
The corridor matters more than people expect
Groupage only works where there is enough traffic to consolidate a load without a long wait. That varies enormously by destination.
Spain and France are our busiest routes, so departures come round regularly and a partial load rarely waits long. Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany work well when combined with a northern France departure. On thinner corridors the wait for consolidation can be long enough to cancel out the appeal entirely, and we will tell you when that is the case rather than let you wait.
Handling is the quiet difference
There is one practical point that rarely appears in the comparison and matters for fragile loads. A dedicated truck is loaded once and unloaded once. Groupage involves consolidation, which means your belongings are handled more times.
For an ordinary household that is a non-issue with proper packing. For a load with a lot of fragile or valuable pieces — art, instruments, Moroccan craft — it is a real argument for the dedicated vehicle even when the volume says otherwise.
A short way to decide
Small load, flexible dates, busy corridor: take the groupage and save the money. Large load, fixed dates, or a lot of fragile pieces: take the vehicle and buy the certainty.
If you are genuinely in the middle, tell us both the volume and the dates and we will say which one we would choose. It is not always the more expensive one.