With charter quotations requiring complex coordination of costings, flight time calculations and customer communication, the pressure to deliver quick, accurate quotes while juggling limited resources often means that these operations have historically been a time-consuming, manual process.
Aerios’ Carrier App helps an airlines cargo charter team to assemble each part of a quotation quickly and efficiently — no more disconnected systems, manual spreadsheets or waiting hours for inputs from flight planning, operations, and finance departments. “They can turn around quotes quickly and provide it to their customers,” Myles Cummins, Senior Sales Executive at Aerios, explained. “In the time critical market Aerios allows carriers to quote their customers over the phone without large delays meaning that you don’t lose the customer on the phone. You can maintain them on the phone. You can build out the quote, talk them through it, and hopefully increase the chance of conversion.”
“For widebody carriers with a combination of both a passenger and freighter operation, charters were always seen as a bit of a cream on the top, so it was never their main priority. But if you’ve got a small team with a tool that can pull data from multiple sources without having to rely on so many other stakeholders, they can generate their quotations so much faster.”
Personal and digital
One concern often raised about digitization is the risk of losing personal relationships that are the lifeblood of the charter market. Cummins, who understands both sides of the market, is quick to reassure. “We’re not there to replace anyone. We’re there to provide tools and services to help the market work more efficiently,” he said. “In the passenger world at Qantas, they’ve had tools for decades, almost since the internet began. But these days, cargo is a little bit behind and has a long way to go to catchup.”
He believes Aerios can help brokers and airlines maintain, even enhance, their personal connection with customers by freeing up time spent on manual processes. “Digital tools like WhatsApp have helped make that more efficient. To say WhatsApp has changed the charter market or removed the relationship, of course not,” said Cummins. “So I believe what we’re trying to do is build digital solutions that help—in fact, if anything—give the market more time to actually spend having conversations than filling out spreadsheets and filling out forms and clicking buttons.”
This approach helps sustain the relationship-based nature of the industry while capitalizing on technology’s strengths. “Our system is super simple, massively reduces your time you’re going to be spending using a software system so that you can spend that time building your relationship and talking to your customer face to face,” he emphasized.
The new game changers
Availability and data have traditionally been the Achilles’ heel of charter operations. “Availability was a huge, huge issue,” Cummins pointed out. “Brokers need to know where the airlines are and when they’re available so you’re not shooting in the dark. You don’t know availability. That was a huge, huge issue.” Without clear information, brokers often had to rely on “experience, which comes and goes in businesses,” creating uncertainty.
Aerios will solve this by advertising real-time availability to brokers, pulling together historical data to enable smarter decision making, helping brokers better identify options in the market. “At the moment, it feels like the reporting on and availability of carriers is just non-existent.”
This data-driven approach extends into the pricing decisions as a carrier. As he explained, quoting decisions often rely heavily on gut feel and subjective assumptions. “You take a gut feel on where you think the market is, who you’re competing against,” he said. Aerios collates “commercial data including historical data, aggregate market information, and also key air freight data points,” which helps airlines avoid pricing themselves out or undercutting the market unintentionally.
