Jizo.ru is the first and only meta search engine in the world with direct access to Russia’s GDS’s
Jizo.ru has become the first search engine in the world with access to Russia’s GDS’s. These agreements will increase the number of flights available to customers via Jizo.ru, increasing flexibility and minimizing cost.
The direct access to Sirena-Travel and TAIS (Transportation Automated Informational Systems) will allow Jizo.ru’s customers access to the ultimate range of fares offered by the Russian airlines – all represented in these two Russia’s GDS’s in the most thorough way compared to foreign ones. At present Sirena-Travel and TAIS are not accessible in full by any other search engines in the world nor can they be accessed in full by foreign OTAs. Jizo.ru will now include the details of almost half of all domestic flights in Russia.
Out of approx. 30 Russian scheduled airlines, only five are hosted in foreign inventory systems: Aeroflot in Sabre, Transaero, S7 and Vladivostok (soon to be supposedly absorbed by Aeroflot) in SITA, Rossiya in Amadeus. The rest of the Russian domestic airlines such as Utair, Orenair, Ural, Yakutia, Kuban are shared between Sirena-Travel and TAIS (at about 6:4 ratio respectively).
Here’s a little bit of history of the Russian inventory and distribution systems. SIRENA (SYstem of REservations Na (on) Airlines), the predecessor and the prototype of today’s Russian GDS’s, was founded in the Soviet Union in 1972 as the Soviet GDS. It was evident that during the Cold War the Soviet Union’s then the only airline Aeroflot would not be using SABRE (like nowadays) or any other foreign GDS’s with a small exception—international flights were still hosted in UNIVAC which was however based in Moscow. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in early 90s, due to differences of views on future developments SIRENA split into two competing distribution companies having proceeded the further development of common SIRENA solution on their own: Sirena-Travel (with its Sirena-2000 inventory) and TAIS (with its Sirena-2.3).
“No other search engine in the world has established direct access to the broadest CIS fare databases before. With this project Jizo.ru becomes a unique meta search engine currently including the most extensive proportion of domestic flights in Russia. And at the same time Sirena-Travel with TAIS not only starts contributing to expanding the Russian market flights’ possibilities–it also initiates the new and prospective business opportunity for future partnerships–with regard to rising role of the Internet in distributing fares in Russia”,–Marina Volodina, Sirena-Travel Commercial Director, says.