TravelSky has signed a five year co-operative agreement with OAG Worldwide that will give increased visibility to the Chinese aviation market. According to OAG statistics, China's international scheduled passenger flights have increased by 13% over June 2004 and its domestic market by 18% compared to a worldwide average of 5% for all traffic. This makes China the world's fastest growing aviation market in the world.
The TravelSky and OAG partnership has four main elements:
— Increased rate of supply of OAG's global schedules database into TravelSky's Distribution System used by over 6000 Chinese travel agents. This enables greater visibility and accuracy within the Chinese travel reservations market for the 1000 airlines that OAG manages and distributes schedules data for.
— Increased rate of supply to OAG of airline schedules for the entire domestic airline market. OAG supplies schedules data to all other global reservations and airline reservation systems.
— Use of OAG's routes generation tools that provides the logic for airlines to ensure connecting services are properly displayed in the TravelSky system.
— The distribution by TravelSky to the Chinese travel community of OAG's unique Travel Planner application which enables the planning of complex travel itineraries and includes worldwide destination information.
The entry of China into the World Trade Organization coupled with the new availability of visas for international travel, has increased both domestic and international demand and necessitated the creation of a comprehensive and accurate database for TravelSky. OAG's services will enable TravelSky to smoothly and effectively manage and distribute the schedules of an ever-increasing number of participating overseas carriers.
In addition, TravelSky has also successfully integrated into their reservation system OAG's Automated Routing Connection service (ARCS) created for Air China. This new service, a first in China's aviation industry, will ensure maximum visibility of Air China's connecting schedules in the TravelSky reservation system. This service will also be available to all other Chinese airlines and international airlines to promote their connections to and from this rapidly expanding market.