Sirena held the XIV annual international conference for agents Sirena Connect: E-commerce. Technologies and services in the travel services sales market” (https://confero.sirena-travel.com/). This year it was held from May 30 to June 01 in the ancient Russian city of Tarusa and brought together more than 60 representatives of airlines and heads of agencies.
TCH acted as the general partner of the conference, Nemo.Travel and International Processing Systems became official partners of the event.
In her opening speech to the participants, Commercial Director of Sirena, Marina Volodina, noted: “Today’s most pressing issues of transformation and adaptation of the relationship between air carriers and the professional travel community, more than ever, require reflection and discussion. The radical revision of the entire digital infrastructure of the aviation and tourism industries, the transition to Russian passenger booking and check-in systems, is caused by the need to increase the level of technological independence of our country. Despite pressure from the United States and the European Union, Russia has every opportunity to ensure that the domestic aviation and tourism industries not only overcome the current difficulties, but also receive a new impetus for development.”
The business program of the conference began with a report by Tatyana Merkulova, Vice-President and Commercial Director of TCH, dedicated to the most relevant topic today - trends in the passenger transportation market in the Russian Federation.
As part of the business part of the program, the participants were presented with reports on trends in passenger traffic during the period of sanctions restrictions and changes in the distribution strategy, in particular, on the results of connecting new sales channels to the Sirena-Travel GDS, Ekaterina Oinlola, the head of the Sirena training group, told .
Maxim Tetyuev, head of online services, spoke about new technologies for selling additional services of third-party providers at Sirena-Travel. Mikhail Lazarev, Head of the Technology Department of the Sirena Commercial Directorate, discussed with the conference participants the dynamics of passenger traffic in the current situation, emerging trends that affect the activities of all participants in the air transportation market, as well as Sirena’s organizational and technological solutions that will help participants in the air transportation market overcome the consequences of the crisis based on their needs and current market conditions.
During the period of sanctions pressure, Director for the implementation of Sirena IT services projects Kalyapin Vladimir spoke with the participants of the Sirena Connect conference about the content and distribution of rail transportation in the Sirena-Travel GDS during the period of sanctions pressure.
Innokenty Baskakov, Deputy Director for General Design of Sirena, spoke about new opportunities for all participants in the air travel industry - the MixVel platform, which ensures content distribution in accordance with new technologies and standards. The MixVel platform is a single point of access for all travel services, creating previously unexisting opportunities for integrating multimodal transportation and other services, which allows agents to move to a new level of customer service, and airlines to provide their NDC content to the widest audience of travel market participants.
The key part of the program was personal meetings between the participants in the format of networking sessions, where colleagues were able to hold business meetings in order to establish new contacts, as well as discuss issues and details of further cooperation with Sirena. A pleasant addition to the business program were excursion trips to the State Memorial Historical, Artistic and Natural Museum-Reserve of Vasily Dmitrievich Polenov and the sturgeon farm of the Priokskoye fish farm.
The participants noted the content of the business program of the Sirena Connect conference, its practical benefits for the reorganization of the distribution system and business processes in the tourism industry in times of crisis.