The use of cavitands as innovative pre-concentration materials for outdoor air quality monitoring applications was studied. With respect to conventional adsorbing materials, cavitands feature lower desorption temperatures and a selective pre-concentration behaviour due to the specificity of the host-guest interactions. These characteristics make them particularly suitable for integration in simplified GC-like gas sensing systems based on micromachined components. The detection limit of a miniaturized GC system with a MOX sensor used as detector will be reported.