A few years ago, alternative carriers had a single track at PARCEL Forum. This year, they were the conversation.

That was the clearest signal from Orlando. Walk the exhibit hall and roughly one in three booths belonged to a carrier. Sit in on the sessions and the same question kept surfacing in different forms: which of these carriers actually fits my network, and how would I know?

The market moved. The map didn't.

Shippers aren't debating whether to use alternative carriers anymore. Our 2026 Alternative Carrier Benchmark Report found that 68% of shippers plan to increase their alternative carrier usage in the next two years. Trust as the top barrier to adoption fell from 54% to 43% year over year. The appetite is there.

What's missing is a clear picture. The alternative carrier ecosystem is fragmented. Carriers overlap in some zones and leave gaps in others. Service quality varies by hub. Pricing lives on separate rate cards with separate zone definitions. For a shipper standing in that exhibit hall, it's genuinely hard to tell who does what well, and where.

"Alternative carriers aren't the side conversation anymore. They're the main one," said Ben Emmrich, Co-Founder and CEO of Tusk Logistics. "But the ecosystem is still opaque and messy. Shippers can see there are dozens of options. What they can't see is which ones will actually perform for their network."

Shippers need infrastructure, not another carrier pitch

The shippers we talked to weren't short on carrier introductions. They were short on a way to evaluate them.

And diligence is only the first step. Once a shipper picks a carrier, they need a way to test it on a slice of volume, expand what works, and track performance at the hub level as they scale. Doing that carrier by carrier, with a separate login and dashboard for each one, is where most diversification efforts stall out.

That's the gap Tusk was built to close. Tusk is a platform, not a carrier. We connect shippers to a vetted network of alternative carriers through a single integration, with centralized tracking, claims, and performance data across all of them. Shippers get the flexibility of a multi-carrier strategy without the operational sprawl.

What we shared on stage

Ben's session, "What Actually Happened When Shippers Used Alternative Carriers This Year," walked through what shippers experienced when they actually put volume on alternative carriers in 2026. The response in the room told us shippers are hungry for real performance data over marketing claims.

Printed copies of our 2026 Alternative Carrier Benchmark Report were also on display at the show. If you didn't grab one, you can download the full report here.

Peak season is prep season

One more takeaway worth acting on now. Most shippers won't onboard a new carrier during peak, and they shouldn't. But Q4 is the right time to do the homework: research carriers, check facility proximity to your warehouses, and start negotiating. Shippers who sign in the fourth quarter can often negotiate caps on general rate increases and fuel surcharges for the year ahead. We'll dig into the specifics in our next post.

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Thanks to everyone who came to the session, stopped by, or grabbed a coffee with our team in Orlando. If you're sorting through the alternative carrier landscape for 2027, talk to Tusk.