While ecommerce sales drove a 9% growth in air freight demand in 2017, manual air freight management and sales continued to cost the industry billions annually in changing fees, untapped capacity, and manual labor. This contributes to the average air cargo transit time of six days, while the flight itself is just hours. That’s now changing, with digital connectivity introduced by Freightos WebCargo and Lufthansa Cargo’s application programming interface (API) services, enabling forwarders to instantly look up contracted rates, assess capacity, and book cargo on specific flights in real-time.
Lufthansa Cargo and Freightos now enable customers to instantly view their contracted price online and secure air freight capacity. This will be expanded globally in coming months, beginning with a rollout in major European markets. Freightos air freight customers, like Röhlig Logistics, are already benefiting from improved visibility, instant booking, and increased data exchange accuracy. Global Airfreight Director of Röhlig Logistics Dirk Schneider explains: “The new functionality enables rapid quoting and booking of our shipments. Röhlig Logistics customers benefit as one of the first through improved information flow and handling of their consignments. We are happy that we joined the pilot and look forward to extending this service further within our network.”
Lufthansa Cargo has prioritized technology initiatives, like APIs. “Through Lufthansa Cargo web service, we are driving the digitization of our industry to offer our customers and partners a convenient and fast digital interface to our products and services”, says Peter Gerber, CEO of Lufthansa Cargo.
According to Zvi Schreiber, CEO of Freightos: “Everyone’s talking about air cargo digitization but for most it’s just talk. It’s fantastic to partner with a forward-looking airline like Lufthansa Cargo for this quantum leap in cargo booking. The result of on-demand booking is that goods will move faster, with up to a day shaved off transit time, and tens of dollars saved per shipment.”