E-tickets will take off during the month

On Monday, in the Great Hall of the RIA Novosti building in Moscow, a press conference titled “Payment for Electronic Tickets: Russian Specifics, Risks and Prospects” was held, organized by ChronoPay on the occasion of the launch of the E-Avia project, a universal payment platform for airline ticket booking, two days earlier in online mode.

Oddly enough, the problems of such an important industry for the country as passenger air travel, rarely receive adequate coverage in our media. One of these problems is the urgent need as soon as possible, almost immediately, to introduce a convenient and effective mechanism for buying / selling electronic tickets. In this regard, we are “behind the rest of the world,” as noted at a press conference by ChronoPay Vice President and E-Avia project manager Igor Zworykin.

ChronoPay is a well-established provider of e-commerce platforms in the international market, which is used in almost all sectors and areas of business: from retail to travel. With its head office in Amsterdam, since its founding in 2003, the company opened additional offices in Spain, Latvia and, in 2005, in Russia. The moment for entering our market was chosen very successful, as a result of which the company successfully realized its potential, based on experience, a team of high-class specialists and an extensive set of licenses and safety certificates, none of which domestic firms have yet compared with. same profile.

In 2008, by decision of IATA (International Air Transport Association), Russian air carriers are actually obliged to fully switch to e-tickets. In recent years, the pace of development of this advanced line of business everywhere in the world is quite impressive. Everywhere, except Russia and the CIS. Even in Africa, more than 50% of local airlines use the “electronic ticket-electronic payment” scheme. While in Russia, a few percent of the seats in the aircraft are sold under this scheme.
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The main problem, according to Igor Zworykin, was the lack of a ready-made mechanism for receiving payments via the Internet, protected from fraud and quite convenient in terms of supporting popular electronic payment systems and bank cards. A number of nuances of a legal nature, which do not allow our airlines to work directly with foreign banks, as well as the complexity of the organization, by means of the airline itself, of interaction between all links involved in the process of buying a ticket through the Network, led to the creation of a fundamentally new integrated E-Avia solution that can easily introduce any Russian airline. According to the president of the Russian Union of Travel Industry Sergey Shpilko, this platform will be the first step towards the development of electronic means of payment in related areas, for example, in insurance and hotel business.

In spite of the “arrow madness”, created on the presentation scheme shown to journalists and indicating the connection between the links of the chain, the order-ticket receipt by the client, the principle of the system is actually quite simple and debugged. The site’s software engine communicates with the global ticket reservation system and ascertains the availability of seats on the flight in question, after which it shows options. Having chosen the option he needs, the client enters his payment details, which are sent to the E-Avia system, where they are thoroughly checked for errors and fraud. In case of positive results, customer data is sent to the acquiring bank, which acts as an intermediary between the payment systems and the rest of the system. He, in turn, finds out the client's solvency of the issuing bank, in which he holds his money. If everything is in order, the web engine informs the client about the successful booking of the ticket, after which he can safely check in for the flight at the airport. After registration, the cost of the ticket is transferred by the issuing bank to the acquiring bank, and then to the airline’s settlement account.

The E-Avia system is a narrow-industry solution, specially created in accordance with the needs of Russian airlines and the travel industry. However, the ability to flexibly customize system parameters for a specific customer, work through a crazy number of defense mechanisms, comply with the strictest international security requirements and our own user support center - all this raises it to a high global level, which will finally be available to our citizens. In addition, an interesting "side effect" of allocating the entire ticket reservation system to a separate project from the IT departments of each particular carrier should be its impressive speed - from the moment the customer data is sent via the web form on the website until it is received (or not received) the ticket should take only about 8 seconds. Whereas even such a giant as Lufthansa, it takes about a quarter of an hour.

ChronoPay CEO Pavel Vrublevsky expressed his willingness to cooperate with all airlines that want to implement the E-Avia system on their websites. According to him, within the next month one of the ten largest Russian companies will already launch it. Work with two more is in the prefinal stage. A partnership will also be established with all acquirer banks in the country.

ChronoPay's big plans for cooperation with WebMoney and Yandex.Money e-commerce systems were supported by statements that one of their main drawbacks - the inability to return a perfect payment - is completely avoidable. Assistance in working with embassies, which, when obtaining a visa, often require showing a ticket (and in the case of an electronic ticket, there will be nothing to show them), Wroblewski expects from the Union of Travel Industry.

Summing up the answer to the question about competitors Igor Zvorykin said that the company is not afraid of them. Moreover, there are simply no direct competitors offering the same complete dedicated solutions at the moment.

The investor and co-founder of the project is the Amfora group , which was inspired by its proximity to the real sector of the economy and good prospects.

Well, it remains only to wait for the first real results of the work of E-Avia in Russia. Perhaps the happiness of instant booking of plane tickets promised to us in any way convenient for us is actually possible. At least I really want to believe it.