July 17, 2026 in Articles
Inside OceanGuaranteed™: The Air Freight Question Every Supply Chain Leader Should Ask
In this installment of the Q&A series featuring subject-matter experts from APL Logistics, a 30-year industry veteran tackles the question of how much of air freight spend is actually necessary and what the cost is of not trusting your ocean service.
There are two waves of customer behavior when faced with the option to try APLL’s OceanGuaranteed™ (OG) for part of their freight that was traditionally bound for air freight. The first wave is timid. Customers treated OceanGuaranteed™ as an experiment, moving some of their time-sensitive cargo from air to OG and watching carefully to see what happened. Reliable deliveries across several shipments led them to reduce their air freight budget the following year. One customer reduced their air freight share from 8% to 6–7%, a significant dollar amount given their large retail freight budget.
The second wave was more definitive. Two customers have moved all their freight from regular ocean to OceanGuaranteedTM over the past eight to 10 months. They understood that even if they were going to spend more, it would arrive within the agreed timeline. Instead of the 23-day transit, they project we will get it here in 17 or 18 days. That transition, from managing transportation cost to managing product availability, plays out more broadly.
The OceanGuaranteed™ product works because of an international ocean network and deep expertise in domestic markets. These are the two main factors that most freight providers still lack. Ocean carriers now offer day-definite FCL options on the transpacific. But they usually fall short in the last mile. The drayage at the destination requires domestic coordination that carrier organizations were not designed to provide. And their offer is only for FCL.
Many other logistics providers have had a go at LCL. But they have not matched the reliability and depth of the network that APL Logistics has built over the years. When a customer books, they get a guaranteed delivery date straight away. The rate calculator gives you one step for the transit time and the commitment. When a procurement team is comparing OG to an air freight quote, the immediacy matters.
OG is a product. It is not a service. The team performs integrity reviews routinely because the guarantee’s consistent hold is the foundation of the product’s credibility.
Depends on the customer. The 95% lower carbon figure versus air freight is one that APL Logistics can validate and provide on a per-shipment basis. The company has a senior director of sustainability whose mandate covers all of its service offerings. The measurement is also performed at the enterprise level.
For customers facing board-level scrutiny of Scope 3 emissions, being able to report a reduction in air freight over time is meaningful. However, sustainability means different things to different companies, and the level of interest doesn’t always track with the vertical. It might be a top corporate goal for a retailer. Not so much for an industrial company. Everything boils down to the corporate culture.
When layered on top of an existing cost-and-reliability argument, the carbon conversation tends to change things. It is not usually the primary reason a customer switches to OG, but it is often the reason the decision is easier to defend internally.
Sometimes air freight is necessary for some retail samples, high-tech product launches, and very urgent situations.
The conversation that moves the needle forward is narrower. As a company budgets for a year’s worth of freight, are there particular regions, vendors, or cargo categories where OG can play a role that air freight currently assumes by default? It is not for everything, but there are parts of your supply chain where this will fit, and you can trust it.
APL Logistics is looking to expand into markets beyond the transpacific, but world events have pushed that to the back burner. For a shipper encountering OceanGuaranteed™ for the first time, there is a good chance that, when designing your supply chain, OG can be something you’re layering into your product availability. Layering and not as a substitute. That means factoring in OG in the freight plan as a defined layer, like companies already layer standard ocean, air, and expedited.
FCL and LCL shipments from 13 Asian origin ports to any door in the continental U.S., with select LCL coverage in Canada and Mexico, are available with APL Logistics’ OceanGuaranteed™ service. A 20% money-back guarantee supports the service if the committed delivery date is missed, and it offers costs up to 65% lower than air freight and up to 95% lower carbon emissions. To learn more, contact APL Logistics to see whether OceanGuaranteed™ is right for your supply chain.