Online booking of charter flights
FORS Subsystem: internet system for charter flights booking (web-charter module)Electronic tickets appeared in the Russian market relatively recently, much later than in foreign markets. Nevertheless, the market penetration rate is very high. Electronic ticket significantly facilitates the procedure of passenger registration. Besides, due to automatization and optimization of business processes in agencies and airlines, electronic ticket technology simplifies documentation and processing of information on ticket sales and passenger departures. It is common knowledge that charter transportation is an autonomous, wide-spread and profitable operation field for airlines. Specific character of charter programmes lies in the airlines' close cooperation with travel agencies. Till recently, the sales of charter flights have been the worst developed and technologically least supported procedure. The usual procedure is as follows. The airline sells blocks of seats to the tour operators, which in turn provide their sales reports in form of lists of passengers. The airline personnel has to enter this data manually into the inventory system of the airline and then issue electronic tickets. Obviously, this procedure is labour-intensive and highly error-prone. It should be mentioned that travel agents usually work with software systems specialized in travel business. Such software enables booking and provision of all services related to passenger travel, except for the ticket issuance. |
In order to respond to the needs of the market, Sirean-Travel JSC, the developer of unique electronic ticket technology, analyzed the specific features of charter transportation businees and challenged the development of an integrated product, so-called intenet-booking module of charter transportation. This module is a subsystem of distributive system FORS. The goal of integration of tours- and flight booking systems is making passenger information available for repeated use during issuance of all documents needed for the travel, including the ticket. Moreover, thanks to the Sirena-Travel's web-charter module, the issuance of electronic tickets has been automated by downloading passenger information of a particular flight into Sirena-Travel GDS from touristic lists (the so-called general lists) in a one-click procedure. The convenient and intuitive graphic interface, developed for this purpose, allows travel agents to issue electronic tickets for charter flights even without having special knowledge or experience in working with booking terminals of Sirena-Travel GDS. The Airlines in their turn got a convenient tool for controlling the travel agencies' access to this service.
Thus, the use of charter flights web-booking technology of Sirena-Travel helps travel agencies to achieve high productivity by eliminating duplication of passenger information, entered into different systems in case of booking groundborne and airborne transportation. The system also facilitates additional operations on ticket registration for each passenger individually. This technology automated and streamlined the information processing, which helps both agencies and airlines to save valuable time. This allowed the agencies to minimize costs and increase employee work productivity and helped airlines to abandon certain routine work in ticketing, enabling them to focus on management and control of agencies’ access to charter resource, and monitor the dynamics of sales.
Today MySirena solution is used for booking of charter flights operated by about 20 Russian and foreign airlines. During 2011, over 4.9 million bookings have been arranged through MySirena system. MySirena extends the distribution network of airlines significantly and provides travel agents with most convenient booking capabilities. The passenger information, once entered by the party ordering the charter flight into its information system, can be used by the airline to issue all the necessary travel documents (including the airline ticket).
One of the airlines implementing MySirena web module for charter flight booking is Aeroflot, the leader of the civil aviation of Russia. 'Aeroflot is the largest air carrier in Russia, whose practice can in many respects be regarded as the industry standard for market participants in the Russian Federation', said Marina Volodina, Commercial Director of JSC Sirena-Travel. 'We are proud that our solutions won recognition and are considered to be highly efficient by one of the best airlines in the world, and believe that the choice of Aeroflot, the national leader in the airline industry, will serve as an example and will encourage the Russian civil aviation market to switch to new modern aviation technologies'.
Travel agencies and airlines were informed of the emergence of a new Sirena-Travel product in 2009. Today, the number of airlines, their partners, and travel agencies implementing our solution is growing constantly.
Passengers can check the status of their flight and print out their itinerary receipt on website www.MyAirlines.ru
It should be noted that the functionality of this module is not limited to flight booking, and provides the possibility to book a bus ticket or seaborne transportation.
