Air Freight to Middle East: Why Do People Keep Looking for Freight Forwarders?
When it comes to air freight to middle east, foreign trade professionals keep talking about finding a freight forwarder. But do you really know what a freight forwarder does?
A freight forwarder is like the chief operating officer, risk control consultant, and emergency contact in international transportation. If you have goods, the forwarder handles all procedures; if you don’t know the ropes, the forwarder keeps an eye on every detail. Their core responsibilities can be summed up in three sentences:
First, booking space — just like a travel agency booking flights. The forwarder helps you find shipping or airline companies, and secures the space and freight costs.
Second, customs declaration and clearance — similar to an agent handling visas. The forwarder organizes your packing lists and invoices, communicates with customs, and ensures smooth clearance.
Third, delivery and warehousing — like a courier delivering food. The forwarder arranges cargo pickup, labeling, packing, and door-to-door delivery. Simply put, once you ship your goods, the forwarder takes care of everything until it reaches the destination.
Here’s the key point: choosing the wrong forwarder could lead to lost goods and money. Is your forwarder reliable? I’ll share five ways to judge.
1. Ability to book space directly
This is crucial — it directly reflects the strength of the forwarder. There are 60,000 freight forwarders in Shenzhen, and over 90% are small teams with 3 to 5 people. They only look for external space in the market after getting orders, without the ability to book directly with airlines.
Better forwarders can secure 2 to 3 pallets of space every week. Take our company, for example — we buy out 20 pallets of space weekly from two major airlines. Note that these are bought-out spaces, meaning we have to pay for them regardless of whether we have goods to ship. This requires real strength, making us a top player in the air freight to middle east industry. Many clients were hesitant about our reliability at first, but they felt completely assured after learning about our actual strength.
2. Quick response to inquiries and ability to get favorable rates
They should respond to inquiries promptly and strive to get clients the best possible freight rates in a timely manner.
3. Familiarity with customs policies
They need to understand import and export customs policies, as well as the regulatory requirements for the brand of your goods.
4. Flexible problem-solving skills
This greatly affects the timeliness. Our overseas agent’s customs clearance and delivery team is localized and scaled, with over 100 employees — including 17 full-time customs clearance staff and several senior consultants who used to work at local customs. With such a team, we can finish customs clearance in 2 hours, while ordinary forwarders usually take 2 to 3 days waiting in line.
5. Cargo tracking
They should track the cargo status, such as when it departs, arrives at the destination port, and whether the consignee has picked it up.
Therefore, when choosing a forwarder for air freight to middle east, be sure to compare at least three options. Try not to choose those with extremely low prices. For example, if most quotes are similar but one offers an unreasonably low price, there’s a high chance of problems. Some unscrupulous forwarders use low prices to attract clients, then find all kinds of excuses to charge extra fees like miscellaneous fees or handling fees. This is a premeditated trap — once your goods are in their warehouse, you have no choice but to pay.
DL Logistics is one of the top five companies in air freight to middle east. We buy out 20 pallets weekly from two major airlines, have priority clearance channels at UAE air ports, and can skip the queue for cargo pickup at warehouses. Our local logistics team is available 24/7 — someone answers calls at 2 AM, and deliveries are made the same day (morning shipments arrive at noon, noon shipments arrive in the afternoon). We truly deserve our reputation as one of the top five.
DL’s air freight to middle east — everyone who uses it says it’s smooth.