The tariff announcement drops Tuesday morning.
By noon your inbox looks different. Shippers who haven’t needed you in weeks are sending emails. Some want to know if their active shipments are hit. Some want quotes on alternative lanes. Some are attaching spreadsheets: what does it cost out of Vietnam? Thailand? Mexico?
The more clients you have, the more of this lands. The emails are not the problem. What your team has to do before they can answer any of them is.
What does an RFQ surge look like after a tariff announcement?
A Section 301 adjustment, a de minimis change, a new surcharge: pick one, and quote requests start landing before lunch.
Some of the emails are clean. Lane, commodity, weight, incoterms, cargo ready date right there in the first paragraph. Most are not. Paragraph-form messages, forwarded threads, spreadsheets with questions buried in cells.
Before your team can respond to any of them, someone has to read it, figure out what the shipper actually wants, and pull out the fields that make a quote possible. Then someone looks up rates, builds the response, and sends it.
A clean RFQ cycle takes 15 to 25 minutes. Twenty of them on top of your normal job load is 5 to 8 hours of coordination work nobody scheduled.
Why does response time decide which forwarder wins the booking?
Shippers rerouting because of a tariff change are not waiting around. They ask two or three forwarders the same question. First one back with a clean quote gets the booking.
If your team is working through a backlog, some of those requests sit 6 or 8 hours. Some until morning. By then the shipper has heard back from someone else.
What does the manual RFQ loop actually cost per request?
For one RFQ, here is the sequence:
- Find the email. Match it to the right contact or open job.
- Read the thread. Figure out what the shipper actually wants.
- Extract the fields: lane, mode, commodity, weight, incoterms, cargo ready date.
- Check rates across carrier contacts, rate sheets, and your TMS quoting tools.
- Write and send the quote.
- If they accept: create the job in your TMS. Your ops team reviews every entry before it goes in. Nothing writes to the TMS without a team member signing off.
Steps 1 through 3 are reading and copying. No judgment. On a normal day your team handles this automatically.
On a day with 20 open threads, those steps eat the morning. Actual quoting starts after.
How can I compress the front end of RFQ handling?
If the extraction is already done when your team opens the email, they go straight to rates and response.
Lane, mode, commodity, weight, incoterms, and cargo ready date already pulled from the email. Shipper matched to an existing account or flagged as new. RFQ bound to an open job if one already exists.
Your team still reviews every quote. They still approve every TMS write. Nothing goes into your system without someone on it. The reading and field-copying just stops being their problem.
At 20 RFQs in a day, same-day response versus next-morning response is the margin on those bookings.
What happens to RFQ volume when the Section 122 surcharge expires July 24?
The Section 122 surcharge expires July 24, 2026. Whether rates drop, get replaced with Section 301 or Section 232 coverage, or get extended, that date means another round of shipper questions and rerouting requests.
That is nine weeks out. If your team is still running the manual loop at that point, July 24 is going to be a long day.
For background on the current tariff environment and what the IEEPA ruling changed for your clients, see The IEEPA Ruling and What It Means for Freight Forwarders Right Now.
TIO reads every inbound RFQ the moment it arrives, extracts the fields, and queues it for your team to quote and approve. See how the inbox-to-TMS coordination layer works in a live workflow.
Frequently asked questions
How does a tariff announcement create an operations problem for freight forwarders?
When a tariff change is announced, shippers contact multiple forwarders within hours asking for quotes on alternative lanes, rerouting options, and cost comparisons. A forwarder with a large client base can see 15 to 25 RFQs arrive in a single day, each requiring reading, field extraction, rate lookup, and response. That unscheduled coordination volume overwhelms a normal ops day.
Why do freight forwarders lose RFQ bookings to slower response times?
Shippers rerouting because of a tariff change send the same question to two or three forwarders simultaneously. The first response with a clean, accurate quote gets the booking. A forwarder working through a backlog may take 6 to 8 hours to respond, by which point the shipper has already committed elsewhere.
What is the Section 122 surcharge expiration on July 24, 2026?
Section 122 tariff surcharges are currently set to expire on July 24, 2026. Whether they drop, get extended, or get replaced by Section 301 or Section 232 coverage is uncertain. The expiration date creates another round of shipper inquiries and rerouting requests that will generate RFQ volume concentrated in a short window.
What is the biggest bottleneck when responding to a surge of freight RFQs?
The bottleneck is not rate access. The bottleneck is the front end: reading each email, figuring out what the shipper actually wants, and extracting lane, mode, commodity, weight, incoterms, and cargo ready date from paragraph-form messages and attached spreadsheets. That reading-and-extraction step takes 5 to 10 minutes per RFQ before quoting even starts.