Airfreight and express wholesaler AMI UK has launched a new online booking portal that also offers instant price quotes.
The Quote&Book portal is accessible only by AMI approved agent customers in the UK and allows prices to be filtered using the wholesaler's consolidation or direct air waybill service, as well as by airport of departure, direct or deferred services.
Prices will appear as all-inclusive, but customers can also view a detailed break-down. Quotes can be printed, emailed and stored on the system for subsequent retrieval when the enquiry becomes a booking.
AMI vice president Europe Sharon Wright said: “AMI was the pioneer in on-line air cargo booking portals almost 20 years ago.
"This new portal fully recognises and adopts the new ways in which our customers want to do business, and enables them to obtain an instant and competitive ‘all in’ price – enabling them to satisfy the demands of their shipper customers requiring speedy responses and prices.”
In its first phase release, Quote&Book caters for airport-to-airport export shipments. Phase II, covering airport-to-door, is under development and due for release later in 2015.
In its first four days of operation, the Quote&Book portal was visited by 926 AMI agent customers, who submitted 2261 quote requests. By close of business on day four, these had already generated 358 bookings.
Wright said: “This is a promising start, and we’d like to thank all those customers who are already using this new facility.
"Our original bookings site has consistently handled around 40% of our business, which was already the envy of the industry. Some 75% of our express bookings are transacted on-line; this figure is now a realistic ambition for our mainstream web portal, with its added functionality.”
The wholesaler has been pushing its online offering of late. In August, AMI extended its click2ship service to its South African operation and announced it would use NetDespatch’s data management platform to improve its customers’ international deliveries.
