Air cargo has never been short of numbers. Airlines track their flown-as-planned rates. Ground handlers count their build-up and break-down times. Freight forwarders report their on-time milestones. The industry has spent nearly three decades building a shared language for quality, and until now, the one party it never fully invited into the conversation was the person who actually owns the freight.
That is the gap Cargo iQ and the European Shippers’ Council have just set out to close. In a move confirmed this week, the two bodies have developed a framework to measure air cargo performance across the entire door-to-door journey, and, for the first time, to do it from the shipper’s point of view. For anyone who buys air freight, it is a small announcement with a large implication: the yardstick is finally being pointed at your outcome, not just the links in the chain.
What Cargo iQ and the shippers’ council just agreed
Cargo iQ is the industry’s quality standard-setter, a not-for-profit, IATA-backed group whose airline, forwarder, ground-handler and IT members build and police a common “Master Operating Plan” for how an air cargo shipment should be handled, milestone by milestone. The European Shippers’ Council (ESC) sits on the other side of the table, representing the cargo owners, the manufacturers, retailers and exporters whose goods are being moved.
The two have been running joint workshops since September 2025, and the blueprint that came out of them extends Cargo iQ’s measurement process beyond forwarders, airlines and ground handlers to include the shippers themselves. The stated purpose is straightforward: so that performance measures reflect the needs of the end customer, and so that shippers and forwarders can use the same performance data to spot problems and act on them.
Marie Seco-Köppen, Executive Director of Cargo iQ, put it plainly: “Involving shippers more closely in Cargo iQ was long overdue.”
Measuring the whole journey, not just the handovers
The framework is built around the full door-to-door shipment rather than the individual legs. In practice, that means four things:
- Door-to-door business scenarios: mapping how a shipment actually moves from origin to destination, not just the airport-to-airport segment in the middle.
- Defined service scopes and responsibilities: making it explicit who owns which part of the journey, so nothing falls through the cracks between parties.
- Milestones for handing over cargo, documents and data: recognising that a shipment is only as good as the information travelling with it, and that paperwork and data handovers are where delays quietly accumulate.
- Support for planning, exception management and performance measurement: so the framework is not just a report card after the fact, but a tool for managing problems while the shipment is still in motion.
Crucially, the parties say they will keep working to make the standard fit different commodity needs, folding in initiatives such as IATA’s ONE Record data standard and commodity-specific care protocols, before integrating it into the Master Operating Plan. The framework will be put to Cargo iQ’s wider membership for review over the coming months.
Why the airline’s on-time stat isn’t your outcome
Here is the quiet truth the new framework exposes. A carrier can hit its flown-as-planned target on the main-leg flight and still leave you with a shipment that misses its slot, because the delay happened at acceptance, in customs documentation, at a transshipment handover, or on the truck to the final door. Each party can report a healthy number for its own segment while the cargo owner’s actual, end-to-end experience tells a very different story.
A door-to-door measure, taken from the shipper’s perspective, collapses that gap. It stops grading the relay runners one baton-pass at a time and starts timing the whole race. As Godfried Smit, Secretary General of the European Shippers’ Council, noted: “Supply chain visibility is a critical enabler of that ambition.”
What it means for the way you buy air freight
For shippers, the direction of travel is clear, and it is worth getting ahead of. Over the coming years, “how reliable is this lane?” will increasingly be a question with a shared, structured answer rather than an anecdote. That is good news, but only if you are set up to use it.
The right response is not to wait for the standard to be finished. It is to start asking door-to-door questions now: not “what is this airline’s on-time record?” but “what is the realistic, end-to-end transit and reliability for my commodity, on my lane, with my documentation requirements?” The shippers who already think that way will find the new framework simply confirms and sharpens what they are measuring. The ones who still judge their freight by a single airport-to-airport headline figure will have the most to gain from changing.
The ACC view: a score is only worth what you can do with it
We welcome this. Anything that moves the industry towards measuring the customer’s real outcome, rather than each party’s own slice of it, is a step in the right direction, and the fact that the push is coming through Europe’s shipper community makes it more credible, not less.
But a measurement is only as useful as your ability to act on it. If a door-to-door score tells you your usual routing is underperforming and you are locked to one carrier, one hub or one rate card, the number is just bad news you cannot do anything about. This is precisely where a neutral broker earns its place. ACC has no aircraft to fill, no hub to defend and no single carrier to protect, so we can hold every option to the same door-to-door standard and move your freight to whichever one actually delivers for your lane and your commodity. Visibility tells you where the problem is; neutrality is what lets you fix it.
Bottom line: air cargo is finally building a way to measure the journey that matters, yours. The shippers who treat reliability as something to be measured and acted on, rather than hoped for, will be the ones who benefit first.
If you would like us to benchmark the real door-to-door performance of your key lanes, and show you where a neutral routing could tighten transit or reliability, we would be glad to take a look.
Sources: Air Cargo Week, “European Shippers’ Council joins Cargo iQ in development of air cargo service” (20 October 2026) · Multimodal / Cargo iQ press release, “Cargo iQ and European Shippers’ Council develop a framework to measure door-to-door air cargo service performance” (21 October 2026) · The STAT Trade Times, “Cargo iQ, ESC expand air cargo performance standards” (21 October 2026)
