Air cargo distribution: The next battle isn't digital booking; it's customer ownership

For most of the last decade, the air cargo industry had one clear distribution goal: make cargo easier to buy online. That ambition has largely been achieved. In 2020, only around 9% of global air cargo capacity was digitally available through WebCargo. Today, WebCargo says carriers representing roughly 76% of global capacity have been digitized on its ecosystem. Air France-KLM, meanwhile, reported that 91% of its cargo bookings were made through digital channels in 2025.

Digital booking is no longer a differentiator — it's the baseline. Which raises a sharper question: if everyone can sell cargo digitally, where does the next competitive edge come from? The answer may define the next decade of air cargo distribution.

The first wave of cargo digitalization was fundamentally about removing friction. Airline cargo portals allowed freight forwarders to search schedules, request rates, book capacity and track shipments without relying on phone calls, emails and manual intervention.

The second wave was about expanding reach. Digital marketplaces such as WebCargo, cargo.one and CargoAI enabled forwarders to compare capacity, products and pricing across multiple airlines from a common interface. Carriers embraced these platforms for an obvious reason: distribution. An airline no longer needed a customer to visit its own website to discover available capacity. Its inventory could appear directly in the digital environment where the forwarder was already working. Then came the next logical step: APIs and direct system integrations.

That success created a new problem. The easier it becomes to distribute capacity through third-party platforms, the easier it also becomes for an airline's offer to become one interchangeable option among several. Great for the forwarder doing the comparing, but for the airline, it means trading away a measure of control over the customer experience, product differentiation, purchase-journey data, cross-sell opportunities, and ultimately the relationship itself.

That doesn't mean airlines are pulling back from marketplaces; carriers like Cargolux and Qantas are still actively expanding across them. It means the strategic picture is less "direct versus indirect" and more a division of labor: marketplaces for reach, APIs for embedded distribution inside forwarder systems, and direct channels reserved for differentiation and customer ownership.

Most leading carriers have moved well past the digitised stage. A number are actively building stage-three and stage-four capability. Very few have assembled the full intelligent-retailer model, and that gap is the opportunity.

What cargo airlines need to do?

The first decade of cargo digitalization changed how capacity gets accessed. The next one will change how it gets sold, and that calls for a different channel strategy, not a single winning channel:

• Marketplace = Reach

• API = Embedded distribution

• Direct channel = Relationship + differentiation + data

• AI = Conversion + personalization + productivity

The carriers that internalize this won't treat the cargo portal as just another IT application; they'll treat it as a core piece of their commercial distribution engine. The industry's first question was "how do we make cargo easier to book?" The next one is harder and more strategic: how do you become the easiest carrier to buy from, while still owning the customer, the offer, and the intelligence behind it?

None of this works if shipment data keeps moving between parties as fragmented, proprietary messages and documents. This is where initiatives like IATA's ONE Record matter well beyond operational data exchange: as shipment, capacity, and customer data becomes genuinely interoperable, an airline's ability to construct real-time, intelligent offers improves directly. As this plays out, distribution, pricing, operations, and servicing start to converge, the customer isn't just buying space anymore; they're buying an increasingly data-driven transportation promise.