Digital Booking from Freightos WebCargo and Lufthansa
Over half a century after first live airplane passenger booking, Lufthansa Cargo and Freightos usher in eBooking digitization for cargo.
Frankfurt, Germany – 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, via the world’s leading air cargo platform for forwarders.
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.”
While some airlines support cargo eBooking on their own website, the Freightos solution enables hundreds of forwarders to digitally access accurate calculated prices and book capacity within one platform.
In order to provide the optimal customer experience, 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.”
Peter Gerber, CEO of Lufthansa Cargo
Freightos WebCargo already has the world’s largest air cargo rate database and now enables realtime pricing, capacity and eBooking for the few airlines like Lufthansa Cargo with the necessary digital capabilities. If capacity is unavailable, the system also supports manual online ad hoc pricing. Together, this means faster air freight. 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.”
Lufthansa Cargo AG
Lufthansa Cargo ranks among the world’s leading air freight carriers. In the 2017 business year, the airline transported around 1.6 million tonnes of freight and mail and sold 8.9 billion revenue tonne-kilometres. The company currently employs about 4,500 people worldwide. Lufthansa Cargo focuses on the airport-to-airport business. The cargo carrier serves around 300 destinations in more than 100 countries with its own fleet of freighters, the belly capacities of passenger aircraft operated by Lufthansa, Austrian Airlines and Eurowings, and an extensive road feeder service network. The bulk of the cargo business is routed through Frankfurt Airport. Lufthansa Cargo is a wholly owned Lufthansa subsidiary of Deutsche Lufthansa AG.
Freightos WebCargo
Freightos® makes global trade frictionless with the world’s online marketplace for the trillion dollar international shipping industry. Freightos helps importers and exporters reduce logistics spend and save time with instant comparison, booking and management of air, ocean and land shipments from top logistics providers. The result is international shipping that’s as smooth as booking a flight online.
Freightos WebCargo optimizes sales and operations for over 1,000 global freight forwarders and air carriers across 90 countries with the world’s largest and most trusted air freight collaboration, rate management, and sales platform.
Forwarders around the world improve freight sales with Freightos WebCargo’s instant quoting across all air freight services from every global air carrier, streamlined digital negotiations, and live capacity booking, while improving internal sales team performance with rate management, CRMs, business intelligence, and live pricing algorithms
Contact information Lufthansa Cargo | |
Jacqueline Casini Senior Director Corporate Communications, Marketing & Corporate Responsibility Phone: +49 69 696-95447 Mobile: +49 151 58903162 [email protected] Andreas Pauker Head of PR and Internal Communications Phone: +49 69 696-95537 Mobile: +49 151 58903100 [email protected] Flughafen Frankfurt, Tor 21 D-60546 Frankfurt am Main www.lufthansa-cargo.com |