We study a variant of the pickup-and-delivery problem (PDP) in which the objects that have to be transported can be reloaded at most d times, for a given d N. This problem is known to be polynomially solvable on paths or cycles and NP-complete on trees. We present a (4/3 + )-approximation algorithm if the underlying graph is a tree. By using a result of Charikar et al. (1998), this can be extended to a O(log n log log n)-approximation for general graphs. Key words: pickup and delivery, dial-a-ride, transportation, approximation, colored arborescences, stacker crane