Travelport Joins Sabre in Aeroflot Ban

Travelport is moving to immediately suspend Aeroflot sales from its platform. 

The GDS provider is making the change in order to “uphold the sanctions imposed against Russia” by other global governments. 

“Like most companies and the world at large, we have been closely monitoring the developing situation in Ukraine. We have been shocked and saddened by the events taking place, and our first priority continues to be the safety and security of our employees and our partners in the region,” Travelport wrote in a message to its partners on Friday. 

The move is yet another in a string of pushes away from Aeroflot, which is the largest airline in Russia. Other GDS providers, including Sabre and Amadeus, have already ended their relationships with Aeroflot, and Boeing and Airbus this week also said they would no longer do business with Aeroflot. 

All that effectively cripples Aeroflot’s ability to operate any kind of comprehensive schedule outside of Russia. It is still flying out of major Russian airports, including Moscow and Sochi, but will not be able to carry the kind of passenger volume it had been prior to the invasion of Ukraine (IATA ranked Aeroflot as the 17th largest international carrier in 2021, a year in which it flew 35 billion people). 

That decline is a major fall for one of the world’s major carriers. 

Headquartered in Moscow, Aeroflot is the largest airline in Russia, flying to 146 destinations across 52 countries prior to the invasion of Ukraine. The carrier was founded in 1923, which makes it one of the oldest active airlines in the world, and had, at one time, been a state-owned enterprise of the USSR. At one point, it was also one of the largest carriers in the world. 

Since the invasion, the European Union, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States all banned Russian airlines, including Aeroflot, from their airspace, which effectively stopped much of Aeroflot’s international routes. The carrier is still operating, albeit in a limited capacity, from Moscow, Sochi, and more, according to FlightAware.