What’s the Real Difference Between Freight Forwarders for Air Freight to Dubai?
A customer said, "All you freight forwarders are the same for air freight to Dubai. Don’t you all use airlines like EK, CZ, TK? Cut the fancy stuff—I’ll just choose the one with the lowest price." Is the customer right? Are there really no differences between freight forwarders?
When it comes to air freight to Dubai this year, there’s only one word to describe it: fierce. Fierce competition on price, fierce competition on timeliness. There are only a few products on the market, and they all feel the same. So many freight forwarders focus all their competition on price. But apart from price, freight forwarders can actually create differences.
1. Differences in warehouse operation capabilities—this is where most problems happen. Because warehouse work is done by people, it especially tests the manager’s ability. Mistakes like wrong goods sorting, wrong labeling, wrong documentation, missing or incorrect loading, and lazy employees—different people doing these tasks will all affect timeliness. So the warehouse is a place that requires strong management and also puts managers to the test.
2. The ability of the documentation team. Things like data verification, accuracy and timeliness of supplementary materials will all affect the overall quality of air freight to Dubai.
3. The professionalism of the customs team. The professionalism of the customs declaration and clearance team directly affects the inspection rate, and also affects the customer experience.
4. The professionalism of the overseas team. The overseas team is actually similar to our domestic warehouse. It also involves problems like wrong sorting and loading of goods, inability to book a truck, wrong or failed container pickup at the terminal, and appointment for delivery. More importantly, it’s about overall coordination ability. All these things are done by people, and people are different. So there will still be gaps between overseas teams.
I have the right to speak on this. As one of the top five freight forwarders for air freight to middle east, our cooperating overseas clearance and delivery team has been localized and scaled. The team has hundreds of employees, including 17 full-time customs clearance staff and several senior consultants who once worked at the local customs. We have more than 50 trucks, and someone is available to answer calls even at 2 a.m. After picking up the goods from the customs supervised warehouse and transferring them to the overseas warehouse, the overseas warehouse decides whose goods to deliver first—ordinary freight forwarders have no priority. When encountering such tricky problems, under the same conditions, we have priority in delivery, which can save customers an average of 2 days in timeliness.
5. Core resources at key nodes, such as airline resources, shipping company resources, fleet resources, last-mile delivery account resources, and Amazon appointment account resources. These directly affect the delivery timeliness of your air freight to Dubai. All these resources may not feel important in the off-season because of insufficient goods. But in the peak season or in emergencies, their importance stands out.
6. Capital resources. Freight forwarders actually need to advance a lot of money. On one hand, customers want monthly settlements; on the other hand, we need to prepay for documentation, pay sea freight first before shipping, and pay customs duties first before clearance. During this period, we also need to reserve some funds for risk resistance. So being a freight forwarder has now become a capital-intensive industry. We can afford to buy a 1,800-square-meter Grade A office building in full, so we do have some spare money.
So don’t say all freight forwarders are the same for air freight to Dubai. After all, every freight forwarder is unique.