Insights from Jonathan Celetaria, Sales Director Europe at AirBridgeCargo  

Over the past months airlines have entered a fundamentally different operating environment. These conditions have set the scene for unprecedented entrepreneurialism, adaptability, and collaboration in the air cargo industry.

For those airlines implementing comprehensive recovery plans, short-term coping mechanisms are making the way for medium and long-term change. Based on our conversations with industry leaders, these roadmaps will include initiatives to reduce the scale of the business, stimulate demand, introduce flexibility and variable cost operations, and implement new organizational structures.

Veit Dinges, Airline Partnerships Manager at cargo.one, spoke to Jonathan Celetaria, Sales Director Europe at AirBridgeCargo, about how AirBridgeCargo’s early partnership with cargo.one is supporting the airline in taking off faster than competing airlines in the current environment. 

Veit: Johnny, thanks for taking the time today. AirBridgeCargo was the first cargo-only carrier that joined cargo.one, and together our teams are currently working to expand the partnership to more customers and markets. AirBridgeCargo now also links directly to cargo.one from your homepage, I take this as a good sign. How has partnering with cargo.one helped and why are you continuing to push the partnership now during the crisis?

Johnny: Thanks for the talk, Veit. Firstly, from the beginning it was clear that the capabilities that cargo.one brought to AirBridgeCargo go beyond the cargo.one technology. Over the past year we have been able to access new market segments through cargo.one, all while improving the quality of our customer experience. Now we are pushing to extend our partnership so that we are positioned to come out of the crisis faster, and better equipped for the new normal, than others. 

Veit: A year into our partnership, what is it like working with cargo.one and why do you think this will help you emerge stronger?

Johnny: It has been a very interesting journey, we were able to experience and learn a lot. We knew cargo.one would deliver a scalable digital sales capability, and that cargo.one would market our product when it is most important. What we expected less was just how much cargo.one provides a service alongside the technology. cargo.one collaborates with our sales teams, supports us with the organizational changes related to digitalisation, provides customer support, and is being highly proactive in communicating our offer to forwarders. I think that is something which we expected less, and it has made it even more clear that working with cargo.one is not just a make or buy decision but that we get something that would be even harder to build than the technology. I think this is reflected in cargo.one’s Net Promoter Score and the by far strongest month in AirBridgeCargo bookings and revenue via cargo.one this April. Lastly, cargo.one’s business model aligns our incentives and provides a variable cost model that is very much welcomed in these times.

Beyond that, I am happy to see that we have established a collaboration with valuable discussions on a strategic level as well as driving tangible outcomes on a day to day basis.

Veit: Thanks for the kind words, I can confirm that both the teams have been hard at work! Is there anything else that has changed at AirBridgeCargo related to cargo.one?

Johnny: A lot of what we’ve talked about has been centered around a digitally enhanced AirBridgeCargo. Similarly, the data we get from the cargo.one partnership management team is being used in our weekly sales planning. It’s great to have market data at a frequent cadence that helps us steer our sales strategies better.

Veit: Beyond the projects we have in the pipeline together already, what else are you looking forward to?

Johnny: I am keenly awaiting the expansion to new markets such as China, Hong Kong, and the USA. We want the above to be a part of our global operations and believe that there is the same, if not even more, potential from working together in those markets. 

Veit: Thank you for your time Johnny, stay healthy and speak to you soon.

Johnny: Thank you Veit.