Interview Transcript: A 20-Year Freight Forwarder Talks About the Pitfalls of Air Freight to Dubai - 1
They raise prices temporarily after receiving the goods. For example, the market price is 20 yuan per kilogram, some freight forwarders quote 18 yuan per kilogram. Customers choose them for the lower price, and after the goods are sent to the designated warehouse, the freight forwarders raise the price right away. The reason is simple: they say the price for air freight to Dubai is not locked until the goods depart, and market fluctuations are normal. They’ll tell you there’s nothing they can do because the airline has updated the price before the flight takes off. You have no words to say, and in fact, they’ve already dug a pit waiting for you here.
So do you send the goods or not? If you send them, you’ll pay 5 yuan more per kilogram than the market price. If you don’t, you can’t afford the delay of getting the goods back and finding a new freight forwarder. Most customers just pay the money obediently. These freight forwarders are just doing a one-time deal and don’t expect you to come back for repeat business.
When doing air freight to Dubai, many peers also have tricks for shipping sensitive goods. Actually, the goods have no other problems except being sensitive ones. But just because they’re sensitive goods, some freight forwarders will collude with someone to trick the customer, saying the goods are inspected by customs and a fixing fee of several thousand or even ten to twenty thousand yuan is needed. Will you pay it or not?
Customers are in a hurry for the goods, so they have to pay the money. But in fact, nothing unusual has happened. It’s just a self-directed show under the pretext of sensitive goods. They just grasp the customers' psychology, because everyone knows it’s not easy to ship sensitive goods and problems often occur. But in reality, there’s really no problem with the shipment; it’s just the freight forwarder digging a pit for you to fall into.
Airlines set prices based on market fluctuations, but there’s a key point here. For example, if the price goes up today, it won’t apply to tomorrow’s shipments, only the day after tomorrow’s. But some small freight forwarders take advantage of this. Clearly, the price rise is for the day after tomorrow, but they insist it starts tomorrow and demand you make up the price difference. The goods are already in their hands, so do you pay or not?
So it’s extremely hard to find a reliable freight forwarder for air freight to Dubai. There are pitfalls everywhere, and even we step into them sometimes. Why? Because the market is constantly fluctuating and changing. Fortunately, we don’t be greedy, so the pits we step into are all small ones.
The reason why this industry is a mixed bag of good and bad players is that there are too many practitioners in the market. Take Shenzhen for example. There are about 50,000 to 60,000 freight forwarder companies here. If each small and micro company has a dozen employees, the total number of practitioners is 500,000 to 600,000 or even over a million, among which tens of thousands are doing air freight to Dubai. It’s simply impossible to regulate the professional quality of all these people. Many of them are like this: if you ask them about professional knowledge, they know nothing about it. They only know how to run business from door to door, receive goods, promise the moon and agree to everything, and deal with the rest after getting the goods.
It’s not impossible to find a reliable freight forwarder for air freight to Dubai, but you need to remember one thing: never choose a freight forwarder whose quote is obviously lower than the market price. This market is mature and transparent enough, and all quotes are more or less the same, with a maximum difference of 5% up or down. Such an unrealistically low price is impossible, and there must be something fishy about it. There is definitely a pit waiting for you in some link.
If the prices are similar, you need to check the actual situation of the freight forwarder company. You can just ask them directly: what are your advantages in doing air freight to Dubai? We get asked this question a lot too. And we’ll tell the customers straight up: DL Logistics has made an exclusive booking of 20 pallet spaces every week with two major airlines. You may think it’s no big deal and that all companies do this. But let me tell you, other freight forwarder companies that do Dubai dedicated lines, even the better ones, only book 2 or 3 pallet spaces every week. Our shipping capacity is 10 times that of theirs.
It’s like we’re one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council. People who don’t understand won’t get it, but those who do will give a thumbs-up. You need to know that we still have to pay for the exclusive booking even if there are no goods to ship, so it takes real financial strength to do this. In fact, there are many powerful freight forwarder companies. Why don’t they book so many pallet spaces? The reason is simple: they don’t have such a large shipping volume. We have a huge shipping volume, and all links are connected very smoothly. Our scale advantage not only reduces costs but also guarantees the delivery time. If you want to avoid delays in air freight to Dubai, you need to find a freight forwarder company with real scale resources and technical barriers like us.