Crisis logistics has forced shippers to rethink what they pay airfreight forwarders for. That is the argument advanced by Air Cargo News in a commentary reflecting on recent disruption cycles, and it lands at a moment when the industry is still digesting what consecutive shocks — pandemic-era capacity collapses, port congestion, Red Sea reroutings and blank sailings — did to shipper-carrier-forwarder relationships.

The core claim is simple: when capacity vanished and schedules dissolved, the value of a forwarder stopped being transactional and became operational. Shippers who had treated forwarding as a commodity buy — cheapest rate on the lane, cleanest invoice — discovered that in a crisis the difference between competitors is not price. It is whether the forwarder still has access to lift, still has relationships at the ramp, and can still make a booking move when the market says no.

What does a crisis actually test?

A disruption stress-tests three things at once: capacity access, information speed and execution nerve. In normal markets, a shipper booking a standard airport-to-airport move sees little daylight between forwarders. Rates are published, capacity is fungible, and digital quote engines flatten the margin.

Crisis conditions reverse that logic. When belly capacity disappears almost overnight — as it did when passenger fleets were grounded in 2020 — the market splits sharply. Forwarders with committed allotments, charter relationships and strong carrier accounts keep moving freight. Those without watch cargo sit on the dock. The Air Cargo News piece argues this is precisely the moment the profession earns its keep, and that shippers who cut forwarders out of the relationship in calm years paid for it in turbulent ones.

Why the middleman survived digitisation

For a decade, the industry narrative held that digital freight platforms and direct carrier bookings would compress the forwarder's role into a thin, automatable layer. The crisis years complicated that story. Technology proved excellent at quoting a market. It proved far weaker at securing capacity in a market that no longer existed on screen.

The commentary's implicit lesson for shippers: the forwarder's asset is not the rate card. It is the accumulated knowledge of how a lane behaves under stress, which carriers overbook, which routings hold when hubs jam, and how to rebuild a supply chain around a closed airspace or a congested gateway. That knowledge compounds, and it does not appear in an API response during the week you need it most.

What should shippers and forwarders do now?

For shippers, the takeaway is contractual and structural rather than sentimental. The article's reflection suggests several practical consequences:

• Treat forwarder selection as a resilience decision, not purely a procurement decision. The cheapest tender winner in Q2 can be the unavailable counterparty in Q4.
• Value the forwarders who communicated hardest during disruptions — the ones reporting real capacity positions rather than optimistic placeholders.
• Build the relationship before the crisis. Access and priority are earned in calm markets and spent in stressed ones.

For forwarders, the mirror image applies. Crisis performance is a commercial asset, and the profession should price and market it as such rather than defaulting to rate-led competition. The operators that shippers remembered fondly after each disruption were the ones that surfaced bad news early, offered alternatives proactively and absorbed operational chaos on the customer's behalf.

The caution against nostalgia

The commentary is not a plea for the status quo. Forwarders who hid behind their relationships while investing nothing in visibility tools, tracking and data sharing did not emerge from the crisis years well. Shippers learned to distinguish between a forwarder with genuine market access and one with a good story. The value thesis holds only where operational capability sits behind the relationship.

That sets the competitive bar for the next disruption cycle: carriers and digital platforms will keep pushing into the shipper relationship, and forwarders will have to prove, market by market, that their crisis value was structural rather than circumstantial. On the evidence of the last several years, the shippers who remembered who moved their freight — and who did not — will shape the tender lists when the next shock arrives.