Airlines forwarders keep coming back to

Forwarders expect their bookings to be honoured, regardless of whether the booking was made via phone, email or their API. The forwarder passes it to their own customer so when it is not honoured, they pay in margin and trust, and end up reconsidering the carriers they book with. 

cargo.one helps airlines hold to that standard. We work with over 80 airlines and thousands of forwarders making bookings every day. Customer experience sits at the core of what we do. That scale lets us help airlines and forwarders identify, market by market, exactly where trust is eroding, and fix it before it costs the shipment.

Across the platform, more than 99% of booking requests are confirmed as booked. The best airlines process every booking as they receive. The weakest fail to confirm up to 3% of their bookings, and behind each of those sits a forwarder who tried to hand over revenue and could not complete the booking.

This article is for the people inside an airline who feel this every day: the Digital Sales Manager who owns the channel, the Head of Sales watching customers quoting but booking with others, and Revenue Managers looking for revenue leakage to stop. 

Recurring business follows trust

Airlines now benefit from being visible to every forwarder's request on cargo.one, without requiring the forwarder to have previously considered the airline for that particular lane. That visibility genuinely helps airlines pick up business on lanes outside their core network, but it is not enough on its own to secure repeat business.

A compelling quote earns a try on a route the forwarder had not booked before, but whether they book with the same airline again depends on the customer service experience delivered. A trustworthy booking is one where the booking holds from search to air waybill, the charges match what was shown, and the shipment flies as booked. That is what a forwarder is buying when they choose an airline: fail to deliver trust and the forwarder has more reasons to stay away from the airline for their next shipment.

Bookings are digital

Both forwarders and airlines are aligned on the preference for digital because the benefits are clear and mutual: quicker responses to customers, less manual coordination needed and wider access to potential business partners. As a result, some airlines have publicly disclosed penetration rates of digital bookings above 80% or even 90%. Those are the airlines that were able to deliver trust early on by treating their online bookings like any other booking: as a promise to be honoured.

No airline chooses to break that promise, it comes down to a gap in alignment: a GSA or local station has not caught up with a rate change, or an update made centrally never fully reached the live booking workflow, leaving the quoting engine to offer something the airline can no longer honour. Closing that gap, not the intent behind it, is where the fix actually sits.  The usual reflex from there is to pull the forwarder back onto a phone call with the local office, even though the forwarder already chose to book digitally. The real fix is closing the gap in the digital experience itself. 

We support airlines’ digital sales maturity by helping them get their content trustworthy for forwarders to book. We use real transactional data to show airlines exactly what is undermining trust, then help align the teams and systems behind it. Three data points show where the gap usually sits.

Show every charge before the booking

The airlines that get this right show every fee at the moment of quoting: the core components like fuel and security surcharges, whether the rate is all-in. Best airlines also display mandatory charges most relevant to that shipment's context, such as war disruption surcharges, customs fees, or SAF fees, and conditional charges that will be decided later, such as FWB submission and warehouse fees. Behind a charge list like that sit pricing, sales, and operations teams speaking the same language.

When charges are missing from that list and only appear later, the cost lands on the forwarder. They either increase their own price to manage the uncertainty, or they choose the airline that gave them certainty instead, since that lets them price more competitively. Of the three checks, charge transparency is where forwarders form their first impression of trust.

The information to close this gap already exists: local teams list every charge when quoting a shipment by email. What is missing is a system that carries that detail into the digital rate automatically. Give local teams a way to feed their charges straight into digital bookings, and the price breakdown becomes complete without asking anyone to work harder.

Accept what you offered

This is the remaining 1% from the opening figure, the requests that did not confirm. Forwarders’ standard expectation is that airlines will always accept the quote they have given, and this is true for most airlines. The weakest ones lose bookings forwarders had already committed to, not because the forwarder changed their mind, but because the local team is not part of the quality process or because of an IT failure on the airline's side.

Fixing this starts with the local teams. If digital bookings are an operational concern to the local office instead of a benefit, this is evidence they are not aligned with the quality of what is being offered, and not only the airline loses bookings but the local teams often need to handle frustrated customers that suffered from a broken promise. Solving it means bringing GSAs and local stations into an aligned sales process instead of leaving them to work around it. 

Second, treat every technical booking failure as a backlog item to be investigated and solved, because next to each of them there is a clear lost revenue figure. Airlines that mitigate each one and fix the root cause close this gap fastest.

Don’t lose bookings to a failed modification

Cancellation and tracking are mostly solved across the industry, but modifying a confirmed booking is where many airlines still fall short, and that leads to revenue leakage: in 16% of cancellations on the platform, the reason given by the forwarder was that something had changed about the shipment, route or date. These should have been modifications, not cancellations.

Two important varying factors across airlines are whether the airline supports digital booking modifications and how this modification happens behind the scenes. It is now rare to find an airline that doesn't support booking modifications, but 80% of those that do still rely on a subpar workflow that forces a cancel-and-rebook, meaning the whole space has to be available again, at whatever the current dynamic price is.

Picture this scenario: a forwarder needs to decrease a booking’s weight. When the airline's own integration does not support a real modification, one of three things happens: they try to modify it, which means current rates apply and the whole shipment has to be available again; or they call the airline, which recreates the manual cost digital was supposed to remove; or finally they cancel and book with someone else because they were forced into the shopping window again.

Airlines that support real modification against the original booking avoid all three, because the change was never treated as a new booking.

Where this leaves you

The airlines forwarders come back to are the ones who keep their promises: every charge shown before booking, every booking accepted as offered, and modifications work as they are supposed to. 

Nobody else sees this many airlines and forwarders booking every day, which is exactly why cargo.one is positioned to help close these gaps, market by market, aligning GSA and local teams with what central digital sales aim to deliver.

Talk to us and get a free benchmark of where you stand against the marketplace on all three, plus a plan for closing the gap.