Unprecedented Progress and Payload Asia 

As the largest and most innovative cargo booking platform, we are proud to shape the future of freight by leading one of the most dominant and impactful efforts to digitize air cargo. Our vision centers around our forwarders, with our digital solutions helping thousands dramatically improve their profitability, efficiency and customer experience. We enable forwarders to offer real-time booking capabilities to the end shipper, providing breakthrough features like payments, dynamic quoting, and market intelligence.

Taking a chief role in connecting an industry-leading 45+ airlines with over 10,000+ forwarding offices globally, we now facilitate hundreds of thousands of bookings every quarter – nearly tripling total bookings between Q1 ‘21’ and Q1 ‘22.’ In some countries, over 10% of all air cargo bookings are booked through WebCargo.

Given the success we’ve been building on year after year, we are honored that Payload Asia recognized this unprecedented progress by naming us Cargo Booking Platform of the Year.

WebCargo’s Defining Formula 

But what exactly made WebCargo the leading forward-thinker of the air cargo industry? It can be boiled down to a three-pronged focus on what matters most to forwarders: 

1. Capacity Matters

WebCargo attracted more than thirty carriers, bringing over 40% global air cargo capacity, online – over double the capacity available on any other platform. Airlines find WebCargo’s reach across global forwarders compelling, resulting in some large airline groups making their capacity available exclusively on WebCargo.

2. A patented freight rate management and booking technology system 

Leveraged by 3,500+ forwarders in over ten thousand offices globally, WebCargo enables the industry’s gradual migration from static, offline rating to real-time booking. We combined expertise from across both the traditional static rating and quoting paradigm alongside a new digital eBooking platform we helped create. 

As a result, forwarders using WebCargo can instantly generate and share quotes for their customers, and include both static contracts as well as live market rates with predetermined markups. Once quotes are shared, they can update in real-time, allowing customers to book quotes based on live airline rates. As a result, shippers now have the power at their fingertips to instantly book cargo through their forwarders, with full control over prices, routes, carriers and more.

3. Value-driving features 

WebCargo uniquely offers a combination of features including payments, dynamic quoting, a carbon emissions estimator (a key capability given an expected increase in global emission reporting requirements!), and leading business intelligence. 

In combination with digital sales capabilities, the data generated contributes to improved business intelligence – including faster and more informed pricing decisions – boosting the second of our three prongs. Simply put: the ability to quickly update prices based on real-time changes to capacity and schedules provides increased pricing and utilization opportunities.

It’s All About Efficiency

In our quest to realize the potential of digital air cargo, our digital solutions are designed to deliver increased agility and smarter pricing. What does this look like in practice? Glad you asked. 

Forwarders benefit from:

• Rapid rate lookup and comparison: calculating routes and rates from multiple sources is time consuming. With WebCargo, a simple query returns realtime rates. Forwarders can keep their customers updated of changes in real time, enabling cargo to be booked even at the last minute on new or adjusted schedules, with the potential to improve utilization through selling capacity whose availability previously would be near impossible to communicate to customers in time

• Faster, more reliable bookings: instead of multiple phone calls or emails, bookings are executed and confirmed in real-time. Forwarders book 80% faster, adding up to one hour per team member per day. For a small forwarders office, this is like having an extra person around!

 

• Data accuracy: Digital booking reduces manual data entry and costly mistakes. Manual air cargo bookings can see freight data retyped dozens of times for a single shipment inviting human error to slow the process. Digital sales improves data accuracy and reduces the time and costs needed to address errors inherent in the manual booking process.

 

This Is Just The Beginning

The convenience of fast, reliable, low touch eBooking, with bookable rates based on actual capacity for specific flights, with instant confirmation – and the ability to easily make changes to bookings – is pulling the air cargo experience up to the standards that forwarders are eager for. 

The increased carrier digitization and hypergrowth in eBookings seen over the last two years show that both customers and carriers recognize the value that digital air cargo represents. As more customers come online and more capacity becomes visible in real time, more rates will become dynamic too, potentially improving utilization and increasing revenue for carriers while lowering costs for customers.