• General sales agents have traditionally acted as local market builders for airlines, but their role is increasingly undermined once demand is established, with carriers moving to internalise sales functions to reduce commission costs and gain direct control over customers and data.
• Digital platforms are accelerating rather than causing this shift, enabling airlines to replicate transactional elements of the GSA role, while displacing the relationship-building work that historically underpinned market entry and customer trust.
• Despite structural pressure, GSAs still provide value through local relationships, negotiation flexibility and problem-solving that systems cannot replicate, raising questions over whether the model evolves or gradually disappears as consolidation continues.

For decades, general sales agents (GSAs) have played a quiet but critical role in air cargo markets: building demand, educating customers, and creating volume for airlines without local reach. It’s a model based on proximity and trust — and one that is now under pressure from the very success it delivers.

According to Danila Maslennikov, E-Com Project Manager at Delta Cargo Shipping Service, GSAs increasingly face a structural dilemma. Perform badly and you lose the airline; perform well and you risk being removed once the market is established.

“You can spend years building the market, attracting customers, and convincing them to work with a specific airline, and then one day the airline decides that this client belongs only to them. At that moment, it doesn’t really matter how much work you did before or how important your role was in building that relationship.”

Building the market – training your replacement

In many regions, GSAs are not simple booking channels. They act as translators between global carriers and local realities, explaining products, shaping customer behaviour, and aligning expectations long before volumes become predictable.

This work is slow and relational. It involves face-to-face meetings, repeated negotiations, and constant adjustments to fit local business culture — tasks that are rarely visible once systems and processes are in place.

“When you work as a GSA, your main task is not to promote your own company, but to represent the airline in the market as correctly as possible. That always comes first, even if it creates risks for your own business later.”

Why airlines take it back in house

From the airline’s perspective, reclaiming sales is not an emotional decision but a commercial one. Once a route is stable and demand proven, internal teams and digital platforms promise lower costs and greater control over pricing, data, and customer relationships.

GSA commissions, even when modest, become an obvious target. If an airline believes it can replicate the function internally at a fraction of the cost, the incentive to keep an intermediary quickly disappears.

“Usually a GSA works on 7%, 5%, sometimes even 3%, and for an airline that already feels like a lot. If they believe they can do the same job internally for 0.5%, then from their perspective the decision is very simple.”

Digitalisation isn’t the cause – It’s the accelerant

Maslennikov does not argue that digitalisation itself killed the GSA model. Instead, he sees technology as an accelerant — something that allows airlines to remove intermediaries more easily once the groundwork has already been done.

Systems are efficient at processing transactions, but they do not create demand or trust. They work best only after customers have been educated and behaviour has been standardised, often through years of personal interaction.

“A system can show you a rate and let you make a booking, but it cannot understand the situation behind that booking. When you speak to a real person, you can explain the problem, negotiate, and sometimes find a solution that would never exist in the system.”

The one thing that doesn’t transfer

What GSAs retain — and what cannot be easily absorbed by airlines or platforms — is personal trust. In air cargo, customers rarely care about carriers in isolation; they care about who they work with when something goes wrong.

Relationships enable flexibility: ad-hoc pricing, exceptions, and informal problem-solving that no automated process can fully replace. Once those relationships disappear, pricing becomes rigid and loyalty becomes fragile.

“Most customers don’t really care which airline they are flying with, they care about the people they are working with. If you don’t have good personal relations, then sooner or later you will not have a business, no matter how good your system is.”

Caught in the middle – What comes next?

Today, local GSAs are squeezed between airlines internalising sales and large global GSAs offering scale at the expense of nuance. They are expected to grow markets without owning customers, add value without retaining leverage, and compete against organisations built for consolidation rather than intimacy.

Maslennikov believes that if nothing changes, traditional GSAs may not survive the next decade in their current form. Yet the work they perform has not disappeared — only the recognition of its value has.

“If GSAs disappear, the work itself will not disappear, because someone still has to build relationships and solve problems in the market. The real question is whether the industry understands who is doing that work, and whether they are willing to let them survive.”

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