Rita Rosário Garcia, Product & Services Director, explains how TAP Air Cargo succeeds in multichannel digital distribution, and how cargo.one as a partner goes above and beyond to deliver competitive edge
Rita Rosário Garcia leads an ambitious digital strategy for TAP Air Cargo centered around delivering a premium customer experience, maximizing process efficiencies and reducing cost of sale. Expanding onto a managed marketplace like cargo.one would prove to be an instrumental milestone in 2019, and facilitate many exciting initiatives. Today, the airline has a strong ability to drive maximum value from digital sales, an approach that helped them achieve a triple digit increase in cargo revenues during 2021.
Garcia identifies three key imperatives for TAP Air Cargo when it came to building their digital approach, “Firstly, we wanted to give booking agents full visibility and access to our flights, prices, capacities, and whatever information they need in order to quickly make and manage their own bookings. That is essential in a digital platform”. Secondly, she points to TAP Air Cargo’s competitive needs, “One of the main things that attracted us to cargo.one was its dynamic pricing solution. We were looking to display the best opportunities to our customers, and optimally steer our flights based on demand.”
Thirdly, the airline was determined to strengthen its utilization of digital sales data. Garcia explains, “We sought access to data reports to help drive our business forward. cargo.one offered us invaluable insights from our customer data that builds up on the platform.”
Easy integration
TAP Air Cargo and cargo.one’s cooperation began against the volatile backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which further drove the urgency to automate and streamline quotation and booking processes using digital solutions. cargo.one used experience leveraged over dozens of airline partner integrations to take TAP Air Cargo capacities live in just 12 weeks.
Many airlines worry about the requirement for resources or skill sets in house to implement a modern digital distribution strategy, or that integrations may be complicated or work intensive. Ruwan Seevaratnam, cargo.one's Senior Airline Growth Manager (AGM), reassures: “At cargo.one, we take as much of the load off the airline as it is willing to share, and our ongoing partner support is integral to our mission. That is where my function as a Senior AGM, together with our Partner Enablement Specialists (PES), comes in.”
When adopting new digital sales channels, Garcia points out a common, often unspoken challenge: “Some of our business partners might have seen cargo.one as a competitor, but cargo.one is a complement, since it allows offline teams to concentrate on complex or very large bookings. The results we saw within just the first months convinced even the most skeptical stakeholders that this is a win-win situation.”
Dynamic to market needs
TAP Air Cargo teams have worked with cargo.one to better enable the airline to identify and pursue commercial opportunities in line with market needs. Access to customer choice data, via the analytics solution cargo.one360, has enabled the airline to fine tune its online sales processes, improve revenue management and pricing. For example, the win rate metric is a compliant and direct indication of whether TAP Air Cargo is competitive on certain OD and weight categories, allowing them to understand their competitive position.
Platform data on how rates and flights perform gives TAP Air Cargo a competitive edge by allowing it to proactively adjust offers to meet market requirements. Thus, the airline has become adept at turning cargo.one’s insights into tactical sales initiatives. For example, platform data revealed strong demand for smaller shipments on full flights. By instituting an automatic overbooking strategy with high yield smaller shipments, revenues were boosted and with no backlogs incurred. cargo.one has also enabled TAP Air Cargo to implement dynamic pricing according to rapidly changing market conditions. The airline soon discovered that cargo.one could optimize for both higher yields or for load factors depending on the commercial strategy for different regions.
The collaboration is continuing to produce new data-driven initiatives such as promotional rates on specific flights, as well as continuous improvements to the customer journey including stockless auto-assigned AWBs. Referring to cargo.one’s continual engagement, Garcia adds, “In cargo.one, we have a partner we can spar with to explore what is possible - working smarter together to define the best path for the airline. It’s from new ideas that we often develop excellent solutions”.
Always eyeing growth
cargo.one’s data driven commercial advice has also fed into TAP Air Cargo’s network considerations. For example, analytics from the cargo.one platform has suggested a strong demand case for tactical expansion of the carrier’s trucking network in some regions.
Both companies share an everyday imperative for sales success, as cargo.one’s revenue is directly based on the volume of TAP Air Cargo’s bookings on its platform - a unique setup in the industry and one that drives cargo.one to continuously improve its user experience for freight forwarders and expert support for airline partners. “We have a strong digital foundation to capture revenue potential. There is also a real sense of co-entrepreneurship - that’s what I really appreciate about working with cargo.one,” Garcia concludes.
To learn more about multi-channel distribution strategies, and how cargo.one can help you accelerate your digital cargo sales, contact us.
