Greetings to all and I hope this message finds you well.
The basic outlook for the holiday is good! However, the weather in both Colombia and Ecuador has remained wet for a long time now and that is never helpful for crop timing. While the Colombian crop is peaking a bit late, the Ecuadorean crop appears to have flushed early in some areas and that has started to create a back up Quito. So your product will be early, late or right on time depending on where the farm is located, and how well their agonomist planned production. Since this is not a one day holiday the stress of filling orders is eased only by a few more shipping opportunities.
The real story of this holiday is transportation. The ability to get airspace is a real challenge for many and the rates are at an all time high. The large bouquet companies are in command of much of the air space by chartering their own cargo planes. However, these are some of the same aircraft that form the pool of available planes and airlines that service the floral world. This effectively sucks cargo space away from companies that cannot make that type of commitment. With that said, you can be sure that chartering a wide-body cargo plane is seriously expensive.
Add to this the lack of available airspace to a lack of trucks to move the flowers to market and things could get interesting. All of the trucking companies have raised their rates and there is still a big lack of drivers. The situation with the new electronic logs has made a bad driver shortage worse and at this point there are not enough trucks at any price.
Now don’t panic if you are a loyal customer of your current carrier floral carrier as they, at least, rely mostly on their own fleets to service the extra demand and less on outside carriers. However, the mass markets use many seasonal carriers and those are hard to find and expensive for all looking to contract them.
My guess is that these cogs in the gears will keep the market strong throughout the next weeks and into the wedding season.
Good luck.
Williee Armellini
Editor: Flowersandcents.com
williee@flowersandcents.com
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