The below interview is an excerpt from WebCargo’s Digital Air Cargo Monthly report, which includes key data on eBooking penetration, interviews with cargo leads, global air freight data trends, and more. 

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In June 2022, LATAM Cargo launched real-time air cargo pricing and booking on WebCargo’s Digital Air Cargo booking platform.

What brought LATAM’s air cargo booking online? And what benefits does this bring to the leading South American airline and its forwarder customers? We asked Jorge Galvez, Marketing and Development VP at LATAM Cargo, for the airline’s perspective on cargo digitization, the challenges overcome along the way, and the COVID impact on innovation.

Air Cargo Digitization Interview with LATAM’s Jorge Galvez

So what are the main challenges that LATAM has set out to address using digital pricing and booking?

We saw three challenges that digitization could address: making our customer’s experience more empathic, transparent and simple, becoming more efficient as an organization, and the ability to serve new customer segments. 

What challenges had to be overcome to make digital sales and eBookings a success?

We had to change more than a hundred interconnected legacy IT elements into a single and robust SaaS cloud-based platform. This process – including building APIs to integrate seamlessly with customers’ systems – was our biggest technological transformation to date. 

COVID introduced major stressors to the freight ecosystem; how did innovation help?

The start of the pandemic coincided with the implementation of CROAMIS, our end-to-end cargo management system. But we never doubted that we needed to continue down the path of digitization. COVID taught us the importance of collaboration between the different stakeholders of the industry and how digitization is a critical enabler of connectivity. That is why we are investing and will continue to invest in different digitization initiatives that foster innovation and collaboration. 

 

What advantages has eBooking introduced for LATAM? What advantages has digital booking introduced for your forwarder customers?

Digital booking has enabled seamless, simple and transparent collaboration with our customers, creating trust and improving efficiency.  With eBookings, forwarders have easy access to all the information they need to make better decisions. Digital booking gives them the speed and autonomy they want in the booking process. 

Click here to view the full June 2022 Monthly Digital Air Cargo report.