General sales and service agents are refusing to fight localized rate wars, instead feeding cargo from higher-yielding stations and building premium airline products to protect margins.

Speaking at the Aviation Connect event in Athens this week, Kritika Seth, executive director of GSA Allied Aviation, explained how her company responds when a local market turns into a price battleground.

The first step is evaluating the relationship with forwarders in that market — specifically whether there is a long-term commitment. That assessment determines whether Allied Aviation continues the business at all. If rates fall too low and no wider benefit exists, the company pulls volumes from the affected gateway and feeds cargo from other stations across its Indian network rather than carrying lower-margin freight.

"India is a very fragmented market in terms of commodity so feeding cargo from other gateway stations really adds value to the overall revenue and productivity," Seth said.

"So if there is a rate war happening in one gateway, I will look at another station to feed in cargo and optimise the revenue and balance out the entire flight revenue."

Price discipline over single shipments

Seth stressed that Allied Aviation maintains strict price discipline and will not reprice a lane to win a single shipment. The decision, she said, depends on what product the GSSA is trying to build for its airline customer.

"It is all about what kind of product I am trying to create for the airline I am working with," she added. "So if this is an airline that I am trying to position as a premium product, we then do not enter any rate wars."

Strong local market knowledge underpins the approach. Allied Aviation works to understand precisely what its airline customers need from the business they carry, which shapes which commoditized battles are worth fighting and which should be avoided entirely.

For carriers, the model offers a buffer against yield erosion: a GSSA that can shift cargo between gateways keeps flight revenue balanced even when one local market collapses on price. For forwarders, it signals that short-term price leverage in a single station may cost them the relationship long-term, since agents assess commitment before deciding to stay in a market.

Data interrogation and selling outcomes

In a later session in Athens, Des Vertannes, managing director of GSSA Wexco Cargo, described a complementary strategy: using data interrogation to maximize profitability by combining products and verticals.

"You have to look across the spectrum to see where you can see those opportunities and then maximise those opportunities, and that is where the data comes in," Vertannes said.

"There is a lot of research that goes into that and then we feedback to the airlines and realign."

That research loop — analyzing where combinations of products and verticals produce the best returns, then reporting back to carrier partners and adjusting capacity allocation — turns the GSSA from a sales intermediary into a yield-management partner for airlines.

Vertannes, in his presentation, also flagged speed of response to requests for quotes as a competitive differentiator. GSSAs, he argued, should sell outcomes, not capacity.

That means knowing commodities, lanes, seasonality and risk; anticipating shipper needs before they become urgent; and advising on routing and service options rather than simply quoting space and price.

He also identified an internal discipline that separates strong agents from weak ones: the service promise made by sales must align with what operations actually deliver. A GSSA that overpromises in the market and underdelivers at the terminal will not retain either airline or forwarder business.

The message from Athens is that the GSSA sector's defense against margin compression is structural, not tactical — network breadth, data capability and disciplined product positioning, rather than matching the lowest rate in any single market. As carriers continue to lean on GSAs in fragmented markets such as India, agents that can balance flight revenue across gateways and back it with hard data look set to take share from those still fighting station-by-station price wars.