A viaje redondo is a round trip sold as one commitment: the carrier is booked for the outbound and the return, at a rate reflecting both legs. Common in Mexican freight, it is the standard remedy for imbalanced lanes where empty returns would otherwise be priced in.
A viaje redondo, round trip, is a trip sold as a circuit: the carrier commits to the outbound load and the return load (or the return positioning) as a single deal with a single combined rate. It is a fixture of Mexican freight commerce precisely because so many lanes are directionally imbalanced, and because cobrar el vacío, pricing the empty return into a one-way rate, is the unloved alternative.
Cross-border, the viaje redondo has extra logic: cabotage limits what a Mexican truck can legally do between international loads in the U.S., so a guaranteed international return is worth real money to the carrier, and that value can be shared.
For brokers, the viaje redondo is a pricing instrument worth mastering. If you control freight in both directions on a corridor, quoting round trips gets you better effective rates than two one-ways, gets carriers who prioritize your freight over spot alternatives, and builds the kind of schedule reliability that survives tight markets. The details to fix in writing: what happens when the return load cancels (a repositioning fee, a substitute load, or a percentage), the time window between legs, since a truck cannot wait indefinitely at destination, and how detention on each leg is handled. Mexican carriers will frequently propose the redondo themselves; treating that proposal seriously, rather than cherry-picking the headhaul, is how broker reputations get built in this market.
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