Cargo iQ and European Shippers' Council agree door-to-door quality framework

After more than a year of collaboration, Cargo iQ and the European Shippers' Council have agreed the outline of a new framework to measure door-to-door air cargo service — the first time shippers have been pulled directly into the IATA group's standards-setting process.

The outline was signed off last week, and the move puts cargo owners alongside carriers, forwarders and ground handlers in defining what "quality" actually means when a shipment moves from shipper's dock to consignee.

"Involving shippers more closely in Cargo iQ was long overdue," said Marie Seco-Köppen, Executive Director of Cargo iQ. "It is essential to align on expectations and agree on common principles to ensure our performance standard evolves to become valuable for a broader audience."

What is Cargo iQ building?

For those unfamiliar with the mechanics: Cargo iQ is the IATA interest group that develops global quality standards and performance-management monitoring for air cargo. Its existing toolkit tracks milestones across the chain. The gap, until now, was that shippers had little say in how those milestones were defined or weighted.

The new framework aims to close that gap by extending measurement beyond the airport-to-airport leg to the full door-to-door journey — the part of the chain where forwarders and trucking partners, not airlines, control most of the variables.

Both organisations say existing standards must address different commodity needs. They also plan to fold in initiatives already running in the industry, including IATA's ONE Record data standard and care protocols for sensitive cargo.

What does this change for shippers?

In the short term, little. The framework is an outline, not a live standard. Cargo iQ will put it to its membership and a wider audience for review over the next few months, with the goal of integrating it into its Master Operating Plan — the group's blueprint for high-quality air cargo provision.

Longer term, the commercial logic is straightforward. If door-to-door performance gets measured against shipper-defined principles, carriers and forwarders face sharper benchmarking on the legs they control. Shippers, in turn, get a common yardstick for comparing service quality across providers rather than relying on each vendor's own scorecard.

"This workshop marks an important step towards strengthening collaboration across the air cargo ecosystem, bringing together carriers, freight forwarders, ground handlers, and shippers," said Godfried Smit, Secretary General of the European Shippers' Council.

Smit went further on the commercial case. "In today's highly dynamic air freight market, ensuring that goods reach their destinations efficiently and cost-effectively is essential. Supply chain visibility is a critical enabler of that ambition," he said, adding that the initiative "plays a key role in establishing a strong benchmark for transparency, efficiency, and seamless collaboration across the industry."

Momentum beyond the terminal

The announcement lands a week after Smit addressed the North Sea–Rhine–Mediterranean Corridor Conference, where he argued for reliability, flexibility and cross-border cooperation in European logistics — with particular emphasis on flexible transport options. The two appearances suggest the ESC is pushing a coordinated line: multimodal flexibility on the ground, measurable quality in the air.

For forwarders, the practical question is whether door-to-door metrics will expose their handover performance. For carriers, it means shipper expectations may soon be written into the Master Operating Plan itself.

Expect the review process to run through the next few months; the real test comes when the framework meets Cargo iQ's membership and the industry finds out whether shipper-defined quality survives contact with operational reality.