Global trade is growing and changing; ecommerce has transformed opportunities for small businesses – the lifeblood of all economies – and is driving developments in infrastructure, capacity, business models, and logistics.
Within the global air cargo ecosystem, Courier Baggage Services are the most obvious candidate for meeting the demands that ecommerce has generated. It supports the efficient and cost-effective transport of large numbers of small, individual packages.
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Whether by happy accident or clever forethought, courier services and ecommerce are a match made in heaven – or at least in the skies.
There are, of course, alternative modes of transport for ecommerce goods, but structural and commercial issues make these less attractive.
Given the volumes of shipments involved, security is a key issue. A recently introduced system at Heathrow Airport, based on improved data sharing and cross-agency co-operation, is designed to better target Border Force inspections.
What exactly is Courier Baggage?
Courier Baggage is, in simple terms, an unaccompanied baggage product. Historically, it started with a courier purchasing a ticket and taking their packages as excess baggage, collecting them from baggage terminals at their destination airport.
Airlines then put their own couriers on planes and sold their baggage allowance. Shortly after, the airlines stopped putting couriers on the plane and just sold the unaccompanied baggage product, known today as Courier Baggage.
Like passenger baggage, there are significant restrictions on what can travel as Courier Baggage. No dangerous goods; no batteries of any kind, even simple alkaline batteries; no liquids; and no knives, to name but a few.
Not all airlines offer a Courier Baggage product, and those that do can offer it in different ways, with different service features. In this way, it continues to be something much closer to a passenger baggage experience than a cargo product.
The courier experience – unaccompanied baggage experience – enables a small community of generally express courier companies to offer services that can be faster and more cost-effective than integrator solutions.
They can also be more quickly adapted to address specific, local market dynamics – for example, supporting the Indian diaspora community in the UK with shipments from family back home.
A different world
The global ecommerce market is simply vast. According to an analysis by ECDB, global revenue in 2025 will hit $5trn, 70% of which is accounted for by the US and China. The UK is the world’s third-largest ecommerce market.
Consumers can shop anytime, from anywhere, using virtually any device, in the same way that businesses can order raw materials, components, and finished goods.
This extraordinary expansion of access, convenience and underlying infrastructure has created a near-insatiable demand, the impacts of which have been felt in every corner of the globe. Online platforms have proliferated. The underpinning transportation and logistics networks and supply chain infrastructure have developed in step.
Furthermore, it’s a demand that’s still growing. Cross-border ecommerce sales, according to Statista, will reach almost $8trn by 2030, up from $785bn in 2021.
While consumers look for choice, value and quality, manufacturers have become utterly dependent upon components and raw materials sourced from across the globe, often arriving ‘just-in-time’ to make their products.
The global B2B ecommerce market was worth $20.4trn in 2022, over 5 times that of the B2C market, again according to Statista. The airline industry is the backbone of the ecommerce ecosystem. IATA says 80% of e-commerce goods by value travel by air.
Like passenger baggage, anything in a courier bag could travel as general cargo – that has always been possible. However, just like most passengers wouldn’t choose to give their luggage to a cargo shed, most courier customers wouldn’t choose to give their courier bags to a cargo shed.
This is because the experience is very different – Courier Baggage tends to have later cut-offs, higher priority, faster recovery, and access to a different clearance process.
General cargo products’ inability to easily capture and track item-level data sets is problematic for ecommerce shipments, where you have consolidations that contain many thousands of different items going to many hundreds of different recipients. Tracking individual parcels or items is a critical requirement for ecommerce shippers.
An inspector calls
Heathrow Airport processes almost three-quarters of all UK air cargo, with an annual value of well over £200bn. Cargo in and out of Heathrow is more than the sum of all other UK airports’ cargo shipments taken together.
For incoming courier shipments at Heathrow, a new system has recently been introduced that automates and simplifies manifest information sharing with Border Force and other parties, including HMRC, meaning less disruption and more targeted inspections.
The new system helps stop suspect packages at the border. It enhances data sharing with HMRC, in line with their long-term objectives, and works alongside existing systems and processes to create an even safer and more secure environment for Courier Baggage.
It uses manifest information, provided by importers and shared with Border Force, to compute a risk factor for all individual packages in incoming shipments, such that only those assessed as suspect need to be investigated.
The courier ecosystem that underpins online shopping and business operations is now so extensive and efficient that it is difficult to see how it could be replaced. Indeed, it is now so firmly embedded as the transport mode of choice for ecommerce that customers rarely look elsewhere.
Two independently developed systems or processes can end up being co-dependent, as has happened here, but the level of interdependency in this case is extremely high, and the result is that both now co-develop to mutually enhance the online trading experience. Long may that continue.
