Air cargo sees its peak season ahead of Valentine’s Day

Feb 13, 2019: Most of the air cargo carriers have been busy carrying flowers to different parts of the world for Valentine's Day.

Lufthansa Cargo has transported 900 tonnes of the long-stemmed flowers on the Quito - Frankfurt, Bogota - Frankfurt and Nairobi - Frankfurt routes this year - equivalent to some 10 million individual roses. The roses are being imported over a period of about three weeks.

The German cargo carrier informs through a statement: "The flowers only remain in Frankfurt Airport for a short while. Just a few hours after landing, the roses are transported onwards from this city on the Main river out into all of Europe - primarily to other German cities, but also to neighboring countries, including Austria and Switzerland."

On the other hand, Latin American carrier LATAM Cargo carried more than 9,000 tonnes of flowers between January 14 and February 8.

To meet the demand for flowers for the 2019 Valentine's Day season, it operated more than 140 flights full of flowers from Bogota and Medellin in Colombia and from Quito, Ecuador, to North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania as well as other parts of South America.

LATAM Cargo tells us through a statement that United States imported the majority of this season's flowers with Miami alone receiving 8,050 tonnes, equivalent to 88 percent of the flowers transported by LATAM Cargo for Valentine's Day and almost doubling regular cargo traffic. Miami is one of the world's largest distribution hubs and is the principal base of LATAM Airlines Group's cargo operations.

The airline adds: "In second place was Amsterdam (the Netherlands), which received 500 tonnes (6 percent), followed by Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing (China), Madrid (Spain) and Paris (France). Flowers were also flown to other destinations including New York (USA), Santiago (Chile) and New Zealand."