IAG Cargo moves hundreds of tonnes of flowers to Spain for All Saints' Day

IAG Cargo moved hundreds of tonnes of fresh-cut flowers from Colombia and Ecuador into Spain in the month before this year's All Saints' Day on 1 November, with shipments up significantly on the same period in 2025. The cargo arm of International Airlines Group calls it one of the sharpest seasonal spikes in its perishables calendar — and the mechanism behind it is straightforward.

Flowers sit at the centre of Spain's All Saints' Day commemorations. On 1 November, families visit cemeteries to remember loved ones, and the tradition pulls significant volumes of fresh-cut flowers out of Latin American growing regions and into the Spanish market in the weeks beforehand. Demand doesn't build gradually. It arrives as a compressed peak, and everyone in the chain has to be ready before it lands.

Who moves the freight, and how

IAG Cargo carries the flowers on its Constant Fresh service, built for temperature-sensitive perishables. The critical infrastructure sits at its Madrid hub: 1,340 square metres of dedicated temperature-controlled space for perishable cargo. That footprint is what lets the carrier absorb a demand surge in a product category where shelf life is measured in days, not weeks.

On the forwarder side, the shipments are orchestrated by Real Carga Ltda, a freight forwarder headquartered in Bogotá. The company starts planning months ahead — monitoring demand and production at origin before coordinating with partners across the supply chain.

"All Saints' Day is probably our most important peak season of the year," said Ernesto Bernal, CEO of Real Carga Ltda. "We begin preparing months in advance, monitoring demand and production before coordinating with our partners across the supply chain to ensure we can deliver the volumes our customers need."

What does this change for shippers?

Capacity, mostly. When demand jumps this sharply in a short window, the binding constraint is belly space, not flowers. Perishables can't wait for the next available slot a week later.

"Capacity is one of the biggest challenges when demand increases so sharply," said Andrés Bernal, COO of Real Carga Ltda. "Flowers are time-sensitive products, and our priority is to deliver on our commitments to customers in Spain, with every shipment arriving fresh and on time. IAG Cargo has historically worked hard to support us during this important peak season, helping us manage the increase in demand."

For IAG Cargo's part, the play is flexibility — working with Latin American partners in the run-up to 1 November to assess demand and squeeze the most out of available capacity. Rodrigo Casal, Regional Commercial Manager, Americas, at IAG Cargo, said that flexibility is what lets customers hit their delivery windows during one of their busiest periods of the year.

A lane with more than one season

The flower corridor is only part of Constant Fresh's reach. The same Madrid-controlled infrastructure also supports exporters of seafood, fruit and vegetables across Europe, Latin America, Africa and beyond, connecting producers with markets worldwide.

That matters commercially. Perishables traffic is repeat business, anchored to fixed calendar dates — Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, All Saints' Day — and carriers that prove reliable during one peak tend to keep the forwarder's business for the next. The reported year-on-year increase for 2026 suggests the lane is growing, and Real Carga's public endorsement of the IAG Cargo partnership signals that relationship is holding under peak pressure. With Madrid's 1,340-square-metre perishables facility as the fixed asset on the route, expect IAG Cargo to keep leaning on event-driven Latin American perishables demand as a structural part of its cargo strategy.