Russian Travel Sellers Can Now Book Travelport Content

Travelport formed a strategic partnership with Sirena-Travel, Russia’s largest GDS, to create a new solution that will allow Russian travel agents to book Travelport content through their existing Sirena terminals.

Sirena-Travel currently enables Russian agents to book the nation’s 200 domestic airlines in the Russian language and its Cyrillic alphabet. To book international travel, they must switch to one of the international GDSs – Travelport’s Galileo system, Amadeus or Sabre – and book in the English language.

The new solution, called Sirena-Travel International, powered by Travelport, will allow Sirena users to use their existing Sirena terminals to make international bookings in the Russian language. The booking will reside in Travelport, but ticketing will be completed through Sirena. The international air content is integrated into the agent’s everyday workflow processes, and all desktop tools and commands remain in Cyrillic, ensuring that agents will need minimal training.

Niklas Andreen (l) and Mikhail Baskakov, general director of Sirena Travel

Niklas Andreen, Travelport’s managing director for Eastern Europe, said the result will be a far more efficient workflow for agents. In addition, the integration of the content will put the fares and schedules of international airlines into the 16,000 Sirena terminals in Russia for the first time, giving the carriers deeper distribution throughout Russia.

Andreen said the agency community in Russia is split between those that primarily serve the domestic market and those that cater to international travelers. About 40% of Sirena agents have no access to international content.

Other domestic-focused Sirena-Travel users sell international flights as an add-on service through separate terminals. “Quite often, an individual agent works in up to five GDSs,” Andreen said. “It’s hugely ineffective.”

Those agents will no longer have the additional costs associated with running separate domestic and international GDS platforms, he said.

Andreen said the integration of Travelport and Sirena’s technologies was not as complex as one might imagine. One of the trickier aspects was that Russia has two payment gateways: an IATA bank settlement plan for international air tickets and TCH, the domestic settlement system.

Marina Volodina, director of the commercial department of JSC Sirena-Travel, noted that travel agents remain the major booking channel in Russia. “It really does make sense to enable them to work more efficiently,” she said.  

Sirena-Travel also will market Travelport’s Interline E-ticketing Interchange to Russian airlines. Electronic ticketing is relatively new to Russia. Until a couple of years ago, any contract – including the contract represented by an airline ticket – required a hard copy by law.