Qatar Airways Cargo is marking a major milestone in air cargo digitalisation as it looks to go live on Freightos’ cargo booking platform WebCargo, providing forwarders with real-time pricing and capacity.

“Digitalisation is a crucial step in powering agile supply chains in a rapidly changing world,” said Freightos Group CEO, Zvi Schrieber.

With this partnership, forwarders working with QR Cargo will be able to book online in real time and gain access to live rates and available capacity, providing critical agility as supply chains contend with COVID-19’s impact and disruption.

Rollout will begin with France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, South Africa and Spain on 7 February 2021. As part of the launch, Qatar Airways Cargo said it offer the ‘most competitive rates’ on WebCargo by introducing a discount scheme to forwarders, resulting in average savings of USD0.06/kg for the first 20,000 shipments booked via the platform in these countries.

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The Doha-based airline has introduced several digitalisation initiatives over the past months, such as online rate distribution, ad hoc rate automation, track and trace and availability via API. More recently, it completed IATA’s ONE Record pilot together with CHAMP Cargosystems and Agility.

“As a leading global carrier, we rely on constant innovation and digitalisation across all our operations in order to provide our best-in-class customer service,” Qatar Airways Cargo chief, Guillaume Halleux, commented.

“The future of air cargo is indeed digital and this change will definitely bring in efficiency across the supply chain,” Halleux added.

Qatar Airways is set to implement a number of special promotions further in the year to push the development of WebCargo bookings. As of Q1, more than 2,000 forwarders and customers across over 10,000 global branches will have instant access to capacity and pricing.