It’s been just over two years since December 1, 2014, when Dr. Alexis von Hoensbroech took the reins as Board Member Products & Sales of Lufthansa Cargo AG.
     But while the “twos” are a traditionally terrible period for growing up, it appears Alexis has handled himself with grace and aplomb whilst undoubtedly discovering that air cargo is a horse of a different color.
     Alexis is accustomed to challenges. Once upon a time, he served as Head of Commercial Frankfurt for Lufthansa with responsibility for network management, revenue management, and commercial business management at the airline’s biggest hub.

Disarming Youth & Vigor

     That job is no walk in the park, not by any measure. Here in a frank, up front, and wide-ranging conversation that both analyzes the events of 2016 and looks ahead to 2017, Alexis brings
a fresh pair of eyes as well as a disarming sense of youth and vigor to air cargo.

First Things First

     “From an economic perspective,” Dr. Alexis said, “2016 was certainly a challenging year for us.
     “But 2016 has also demonstrated to us that our customers really appreciate our sustained efforts to improve further.
     “We have set a lot of things in motion together.
     “I would like to express my utmost appreciation to many of them for the superb cooperation.
     “The strong fourth quarter 2016 was a great relief for us and the solid demand seems to continue into this year, thus helping us to return to a healthier level.”

Clear Choices For 2017

     “Our goal is clear: we want to be the first choice for our customers when it comes to air cargo.
     “Our new structure with flatter hierarchies will help us in this.
     “Being closer to our customers now will allow us to be even faster and more pragmatic than before in our decision-making for them.”

IATA CEIV Leads The Way

     “Lufthansa is one of the few airlines in the world with IATA CEIV certification.
     “This is both an achievement and an incentive for us.
     “We want to be the first choice for our customers in the area of temperature-sensitive goods as well.
     “With this in mind, we will significantly expand our Cool Center at the Frankfurt hub this year.

Forwarders In Numbers

     “Forwarders are our customers and account for the vast majority of our business.
     “We enjoy very strong relationships to most of the big forwarders as well as to many small- and medium-sized businesses.
     “And we will continue to do our very best for them in the future as well.”

Amidst reports that the Lufthansa Cargo product branded Emergency.Solutions may lead to occasional bumping of contract rate cargo, causing issues with forwarder customers and others who fear loss of predictable service—including the fact that Lufthansa does not guarantee bumped cargo will ship on the “next flight, [but] rather the next available flight”—a spokesman for the airline told FlyingTypers:  It goes without saying that we do all we can to transport every single item of cargo as booked.  However,” the spokesman said, “naturally there is limited cargo capacity on each flight.  So if our customers book exceptionally large volumes of high-priority cargo at short notice using our Emergency.solutions product, for example, it is conceivable that a booking with a lower transport priority and more flexible timeframe might have to be rebooked on an alternative flight.  However,” the spokesman emphasized, “there are relatively few high-priority cargo bookings of this nature.  Thus, rebookings affecting the guaranteed time of arrival are extremely rare.  Of course, in such a case we would work with the customer affected by the rebooking to find the best possible solution.”

The Power To Deliver

     “We provide the strongest cargo uplift network to, from, and across Europe, sitting with our main base in the largest European airfreight market: Frankfurt.
     “And being German engineers, it is our tradition and ambition to provide the best quality in the industry combined with strong product and business innovation.
     “But we are also very self critical when it comes to our reliability and will continue working on constantly exceeding the highest standards with respect to this.
     “Of course we also sometimes cause service failures, but every failure is also an opportunity to learn from it, thus constantly improving our service.
     “Our restructuring effort also offers us great opportunities to become even more flexible.”

Taking An Industry View

     “We believe our industry has to become better digitally connected.
     “Compared with other industries, air cargo is lagging behind dramatically in this respect.
     “We want to contribute to the digital change as Lufthansa Cargo and are in constant dialog with our customers and partners regarding this.
     “Lufthansa has always been known to the market for quality services and tailored products.
     “We believe this clearly serves the need of the shippers.
     “After all, when shippers use air cargo, their motivation is not so much saving money but fixing a problem.
     “So quality and reliability are key!
     “We are in a constant dialogue with various shippers to innovate our products to best fit their specific needs.
     “This is further intensified as we introduced an industry development function as part of our product management department as of January 2017.”

Getting Back To Basics

     “We launched td.Basic, a deferred product at a very attractive price, only bookable online.
     “It made a promising start over the past few weeks and we are looking forward to its development in 2017.
     “Towards the end of next year (2017), we will also launch our new booking engine, which will allow all our products to be booked online.
     “Our view is this action is an exciting and important step towards digitization.
     “Last but not least, we introduced a new service for private customers last year.
     “With myAirCargo, we now fly over-sized odds and ends as well, such as bulky holiday souvenirs that customers want shipped across the Atlantic.
     “This is certainly a niche product in the industry, but we are excited to see how it develops.”

What Needs To Be Done

     “It might not sound very out of the box, but I believe the single most important change to this industry is digitization.
     “We still have so much unnecessary cost across our industry, our average industry quality levels are poor, and shipments still spent too much time sitting around in warehouses.
     “Digitization can significantly improve all of this, if we take a serious effort.
     “And if we don’t do it ourselves, someone else will step into this opportunity.
     “However, air cargo remains a very exciting industry with great characters and a strong human factor.
     “This is unique and I am convinced this will prevail despite digitization as the soul of our business.”
Geoffrey