Air freight or a hand carry

This page is written by a hand carry placement desk. That is a conflict of interest and it is stated here rather than hidden: the desk earns when a courier flies. It is also why the page is worth reading, because the cases where a hand carry is wrong are the cases the desk has to turn away, and it has turned away enough of them to be specific about where the line is.

The short version. Below about 32 kg, when the date is inside 48 hours, when the item cannot be handed over, and when a missed flight costs more than the freight, a hand carry wins. Above a few hundred kilos, when the date is a week out, when the consignment is bulky rather than heavy, and when the receiver has a broker who works in air cargo, air freight wins by a distance and nothing a courier desk can say changes that.

A hand carry is priced on a seat and a person. The consignment rides as cabin baggage with a courier who is booked on a named flight, so what you are buying is an airfare, the courier and the desk time around them. Weight matters only in that it has to fit the cabin allowance, and volume matters only in that it has to fit an overhead locker or under a seat. A dense, small, valuable item is the cheapest thing a hand carry ever moves and the most expensive thing air freight ever moves, relative to its size.

That is the whole economic difference in one sentence: air freight charges you for space on an aircraft, a hand carry charges you for a seat on it.

The hours in an air freight movement that are not flight time are the ones people forget. A forwarder needs the goods before the airline cut off, and the cut off on a passenger flight is commonly several hours before departure and earlier still for a freighter. The consignment is accepted, screened, and built onto a unit load device. At the far end the unit is broken down, the shipment is transferred to a shed, the broker files the entry, and only then does a truck take it to the door. None of that is slow because anybody is careless. It is slow because it is a queue that many shipments are standing in.

A hand carry does not enter that queue. The courier is a passenger, the item is cabin baggage, the customs declaration is made in person on arrival, and the item goes to the door in a taxi. The clock is collection, drive, check in, fly, clear, deliver. The site publishes real timed examples of that clock on how a booking runs, with the steps that are outside anybody's control marked separately.

What this site does not hold is measured door to door times for air freight. Those depend on the forwarder, the shed, the broker and the day, and quoting an average would be inventing one. What it does hold is the flight itself, modelled from real scheduled network data, on the corridor pages. Use the flight time as the floor and ask your forwarder for the rest.

Express and courier tariffs commonly use a divisor of 5000 instead of 6000. The same crate then computes at 172.8 kg. Nothing about the crate changed. This is the single most common reason a quote comes back higher than expected, and it is worth checking which divisor a quote used before arguing about the rate.

A hand carry is indifferent to all of it, within a hard ceiling. A 9 kg box measuring 40 by 30 by 25 centimetres has a volumetric weight of 5 kg and a gross weight of 9, and a courier is charged for neither: it fits the cabin allowance and that is the end of the question. But at 40 kg the same logic collapses, because one person cannot carry it, and above 32 kg the desk is either splitting the consignment across two couriers or telling you to fly it as freight.

The cost is time and control. A consolidation has to be built before it flies and broken down after it lands, and both of those happen on the consolidator's schedule rather than yours. If your shipment is ready on Tuesday and the consolidation closes on Thursday, the consolidation is what decides your departure. If one house shipment in the group has a document problem at the far end, the whole unit can sit while it is resolved.

A direct booking, sometimes called a straight or single shipment, moves under its own master air waybill. It costs more per kilo and it moves on the schedule you chose. For anything with a deadline this is usually the honest comparison to make, and a consolidated rate quoted against a direct requirement is not a like for like number.

A hand carry is the extreme of direct. There is nothing else in the unit because there is no unit, and the only schedule that governs it is the flight the courier is ticketed on. The service levels page lays the four options out side by side.

In a cargo network, a shipment that misses its flight waits for the next flight with capacity, and capacity is not the same thing as a departure. Cargo is offloaded for weight and balance, for a higher priority booking, for a fuel stop, or because the belly is full of bags on a heavy passenger day. On a lane with several daily services that costs hours. On a lane with three services a week it costs days, and if the miss happens on a Friday it can cost most of a week. Rebooking is a request into a system that is allocating scarce space, not a seat change.

A courier who misses a connection is a passenger who missed a connection. They are rebooked on the next departure with a seat, on any carrier the ticket allows, and the consignment stays with them the whole time. It never enters a shed and it is never separated from the person responsible for it. The desk can also do something a cargo system cannot: put the courier on a different routing entirely, through a different hub, while they are still airside.

That is the real product a hand carry sells. Not speed on a good day, which air freight can match, but a much smaller loss on a bad one. If the cost of arriving a day late is large, the comparison stops being about the freight bill.