Offering numerous technology-driven benefits to the air cargo industry—freight forwarders, airports and airlines alike—such as eBooking, freight rate management, and online freight sales, alongside the advantage of a high level of data security, WebCargo®—a Freightos Group company is making global trade smoother. WebCargo’s booking platform directly connects 30+ airlines and 10,000+ freight forwarder offices around the world for real-time pricing and booking. It also offers leading rate management tools that digitise rates from over 300 airlines for its valuable customers. Manel Galindo, CEO of the leadingdigital booking platform for international shipping, in an exclusive interaction with Ritika Arora Bhola discusses extensively about the industry and the way it is accelerating digital air cargo adoption via WebCargo—the significance and benefits of such an advanced tech platform in today’s times for sales, booking, management. Importantly, Galindo emphasises how enthusiastic Indian forwarders are about digitising their freight sales and operations. “The tech-forward lifestyle in India eases the way for WebCargo adoption which gives forwarders a B2B platform with a B2C experience,” he remarks.
Could you elaborate on how WebCargo functions and its instantaneous offerings to both forwarders and airlines?
WebCargo’s Digital Air Cargo (DAC) booking platform connects to the pricing and booking systems of 30+ airlines in real-time. WebCargo users can then, using our booking platform, search, compare, and book with those airlines directly, with airline confirmation and secured capacity within minutes.
Airlines leverage the platform to reach a massive aggregation of freight forwarders, reducing their cost of sale and improving revenue management, while forwarders gain additional transparency, reduce costs, and improve their speed of booking from hours to minutes. On the freight rate management and sales side, our multimodal rate management tool ‘AcceleRate’ and our air cargo rate management tool ‘WebCargo Air’ enable easy rate ingestion. The same digital booking is then made available on our core platform, as well as connectivity to ‘WebCargo Vista’, a leading online sales portal platform that leverages technology from ‘freightos.com’, the world’s largest freight marketplace.
These tools are used by some of the world’s largest freight companies, including Yusen Logistics, Hellmann Worldwide, and Nippon Express.
How is this digital tool going to benefit the industry in the coming years?
Digital air cargo benefits every player in supply chain logistics; there’s a reason. We’ve seen meteoric growth of over 20x in booking volumes over the past year. Forwarders can provide their customers with faster, more accurate information, and carriers can sell cargo directly to their customers on a self-service model, and/or as one customer rightly expressed, “It used to take three hours to book an air cargo shipment. With WebCargo, it only takes us five minutes.”
Shippers get faster service and players across the supply chain gain better visibility, more choice, and more control in the freight shipping process. It’s a win-win situation.
Experts believe achieving 100 percent digitisation can only save the industry from unprecedented crises like COVID-19. What was the initial idea before launching this tech platform and future prospects?
WebCargo has been providing forwarders with digital tools for better sales and operations since 2008, beginning with digitising air rates for instant search and look up across the organisation. Connecting carriers and forwarders in real-time for pricing and booking was a natural outgrowth of providing digital connectivity for rate management between carriers and forwarders, and we continue to work hard to build and expand as much digital connectivity and capacity within the industry as possible.
There are a dozen other tech platforms operating within the industry and players and companies are adopting them for full control over their simultaneous operations. What makes WebCargo different from other tech platforms?
WebCargo enables faster, easier and more efficient air cargo sales and operations for forwarders and carriers, and we’re different for a few reasons. We currently have the largest amount of airline capacity available on our platform, with carriers that represent nearly triple the amount of available freight tonne kilometers (FTKs) compared to other platforms. No other platform offers the range of capabilities that WebCargo offers. WebCargo’s forwarders around the world and of all sizes can combine eBooking with our rate management solutions, digital customer quotation module, and TMS/API connectivity. Together, these tools unlock even greater organisational and operational efficiencies.
When WebCargo was initially launched over a decade back, what were the prevalent challenges faced?
Progress comes slowly, and then suddenly. Sometimes events like COVID give an industry the push needed to invest in change, but they don’t fundamentally rewrite business rules. Digital air cargo growth in general had started before the beginning of COVID. WebCargo was already the largest platform for air cargo quoting, but crucially, it was mostly based on static rates. One of the main challenges in digitising air cargo is the fact that although many airlines and forwarders have tech stacks, no two tech stacks are ever the same, which makes seamless connectivity across the industry as a whole a challenge.
In addition, the air cargo industry is far more fragmented, with hundreds if not thousands of players rather than just dozens of large ones. For example, the top five ocean liners represent over 65 per cent of all global containerised cargo. But, the top airlines only represent about 38 per cent of global air cargo. However, we’ve already connected with over a quarter of the air cargo industry’s capacity, and today, the industry mindset towards digital bookings has widely been accepted. In a way, the capacity crunch during COVID, together with conditions dictating more work required to be done by fewer people, helped drive this shift.
Big freight forwarders and airlines like Panalpina, Kuehne + Nagel, GEODIS, Qatar Airways Cargo, IAG Cargo, Lufthansa Cargo, etc. have adopted WebCargo. How do you foresee the future of global air cargo industry?
Today, we see an industry rigourously benefitting from the increased efficiency and connectivity that digitisation offers. The past two years have proven how agile and responsive this industry can be. At the same time, we have seen how multiple stakeholders are adopting digitisation as away to keep up with the pace of the economy and the changing purchasing behaviour of consumers, be it across businesses or in the case of individuals. Of course, this industry will face challenges, as it has done in the past, but it will be much better equipped to react and overcome them.
How is the Indian air cargo sector reaction to your digital platform? What kind of response you have been getting from the Indian players. Can you name some of your Indian clients?
Indian air carriers are still reacting to the pandemic—the recent change about domestic flight caps being one example. We’ve seen that Indian forwarders are enthusiastic about digital air cargo, which makes sense as India represents 4 or 5 per cent of global markets, and is extremely large and diverse with lots of consolidators working with small forwarders.
We recently opened up a WebCargo office in India. We believe that India is a perfect market for digital air cargo adoption, as India puts a strong emphasis on adopting digital transactions and innovation generally and is traditionally open to industry digitalisation. The tech-forward lifestyle in India eases the way for WebCargo adoption which gives forwarders a B2B platform with a B2C experience.
We also recognise that different geographies have different needs; one way we’re accommodating is through the impending launch of a mobile app for digital air cargo booking wherein any user can book air cargo while working from anywhere, even without stable land internet.
How do you think this collaboration—a combination of WebCargo and airline’s capacity and service can benefit customers at large. What are its advantages?
Forwarders benefit from faster and more accurate sales and operations—in a manually processed shipment, data can be manually re-entered nearly 100 times. Digital data means fewer human mistakes, while forwarders can provide their customers with faster turnaround times on quoting and processing their shipments faster, which is also better customer service.
Could you reveal on efficient digital transformation strategies WebCargo is prioritising this year and beyond?
We’re excited about the potential to continue to digitise more airlines, providing deeper AI-driven enhancements that provide dynamic pricing and improved matching for airlines and forwarders. We’re extending that same ability to freight forwarders, enabling them to provide better, faster quotes, and booking to their customers. We’re also beginning to expand our platform towards ocean freight bookings. We plan to bring 100 per cent of global capacity online.
More importantly, as digital air cargo unlocks new efficiencies, we hope to help to grow the total market of air cargo utilisation. So, in essence, we’re aiming for more than 100 per cent. We have several announcements coming up with new airlines joining the system, as well as enhanced functionalities and products—do keep your eyes on this space for news and latest updates.
