Treat GSAs fairly or pay the price says NCS

THINGS need to change and change soon, according to Howard Jones (right), president of Network Cargo Systems.

“You cannot sell cargo at the rates that we’re selling cargo today. It’s an impossibility,” he says.

Jones has been in the industry for 25 years and like so many others he says he’s never seen the rates so low as they are at the moment. “Beating each other up over a nickel and dime and running rates for a 15-hour flight at 40c a kilo, that’s insane. I’ve heard that one Middle Eastern carrier is offering 40p a kg to anywhere in their system, ex-UK. How feasible is that?”

With first Lufthansa Cargo and now Air France-KLM Cargo and others announcing dramatic rate rises, Jones says that he can see why they have resorted to such a move as the record low rates were “ridiculous”.

“I don’t think the airlines have a choice with the amount of money they’re losing. Personally though, I think the airlines are their own worst enemy. In the 25 years I’ve worked in the sector all the costs have gone up tremendously. I don’t know the rhyme or reason of this but whether you’ve got belly or whether you’ve got freighters, this is not a business that is run properly, end of story.

“Some airlines run on tonnage, some on market share and only some on revenue generation. No one knows what one particular big British carrier runs on. It doesn’t make any business sense. With any of them, you don’t know whether they run on volume, rates, yield or revenue because the market is that everyone just wants to get anything on their plane at any cost.”

 

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