The digital freight solution Quick Quotes Spot is part of our Online Business Suite and provides you with even more planning, certainty, and transparency for your shipments. Using Quick Quotes Spot, you can request your fixed rate, immediately see the available voyages, and get your booking confirmed instantly. What’s more, booking via Quick Quotes Spot offers unique features such as a loading guarantee at load and transshipment ports and an equipment guarantee.

We recently spoke with Alfonso de los Ríos, CEO of Nowports, about his experience with our Quick Quotes Spot solution.

1. Would you please briefly describe your business and your role in the company?

Nowports is the first digital freight forwarder in LATAM. Our customers get customized logistics solutions with a digital platform for their business intelligence and flexible financing alternatives.

As the CEO of Nowports, I am responsible for charting the company’s strategic direction, coordinating departments, and building a proactive, innovative, and passionate team to revolutionize LATAM’s supply chain procedures.
 

2. What is your experience with Hapag-Lloyd’s Quick Quotes Spot tool? What were your initial thoughts when it was first launched?

We use this tool daily. Although we have an excellent relationship with our local Hapag-Lloyd sales executive and inside sales, the Quick Quotes Spot tool has sped up the process of getting rates and space availability. This tool is very aligned with Nowports’ technological nature.
 

3. How do you use the Quick Quotes Spot tool in your daily business?

When we receive a quote or business request from our sales team, one of the first steps is to search for rates and spaces in this tool. We also have a small team constantly looking for spaces and alternatives for frequent destinations and origins. We present those to the sales team so that they can offer them to our customers. Nowports uses this tool both in a reactive and (mostly) in a proactive way.
 

4. How do you think the Quick Quotes Spot tool will assist you in growing your business in the future?

As explained before, it helps us not only by reducing our answer times – a priority for our customers – but also, by providing accurate alternatives and solutions for meeting our customers’ needs, regarding rates and space. Since it shows upcoming vessels as well, it gives us the big picture of the current space situation under the Spot and a regular quote.

Nowports’ goal is to link our platforms (Hapag-Lloyd’s Quick Quotes Spot and Nowports’ Online Business), so our team and customers can access all the information with one click.
 

5. In your opinion, how could we make Quick Quotes Spot even better?

We would like to get alerts when a special route is open. That would allow us to take immediate commercial action. Also, we would like to see more routes and products. Our team is excited that the USA export route has now also opened under this tool.

Finally, we would like to see additional non-regular services, like more free time. Those could make a difference with some customers.
 

6. In addition to Quick Quotes Spot, are you also still using Quick Quotes? If so, in which situations do you use Quick Quotes and in which Quick Quotes Spot?

Yes, we use both:

• Quick Quotes when the customer needs a monthly validity or special batches. When a further discount and additional conditions are needed, we send this proposal to our commercial executive at Hapag-Lloyd for validation.
• Quick Quotes Spot for routes with complicated space availability, for single shipments, or small batches. Situations in which the availability weighs more than the price.
   

7. Are there any other comments you would like to make?

We are excited and grateful for this opportunity to cooperate with Hapag-Lloyd. Our company is now a scale-up, but since we launched as a start-up, we have felt support from Hapag-Lloyd. You listen to our needs and make changes for the end users to speed up our work and make it simpler.

We strongly believe that, with the API’s rate level integration and Quality Freight Product negotiation, we will have a closer business relationship, resulting in more volume to deliver together to our customers.

Thank you for the interview, Alfonso!