The top 10 most-read Air Cargo World articles in 2018

#1: UPS, FedEx suffered high late-delivery rates during 2017 holiday season

Surprisingly, this seemingly modest Jan. 19 piece on the track record of integrators during the hectic peak season on 2017 struck a nerve in our readers, prompting more clicks than any other story in 2018. While the story did not single out any one express carrier for lateness, the post-holiday analysis of deliveries performed by LateShipment.com found that both UPS and FedEx had some last-mile problems while they tried to process record-high delivery volumes.

LateShipment’s CEO, Sriram Sridhar, said that ground shipments for UPS and FedEx suffered the greatest delays and “alarmingly high late delivery rates during the holiday season, with many major common shipping types performing two to three times worse” between Nov. 27 and Dec. 24, 2017, than at “other time periods during the year.”

Sridhar’s analysis, however, differed from most of the post-holiday assessment. For instance, Bloomberg’s Michael Sasso wrote that, “United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp. delivered almost all of people’s presents by Christmas Day, with the former company finishing strong after a bruising late November.”

The jury’s still out on whether the 2018 peak was handled any better by the integrators. But you can bet our readers will be more than eager to find out next month, when Air Cargo World returns to analyze the results in the new year.