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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why the headline doesn't include Amadeus also. They are doing the same thing. It's a much bigger deal that the "Big 2" are dropping Aeroflot distribution at the same time.

Note that Aeroflot can still sell direct on their website or call center. I don't know how many of their sales are GDS/Amadeus and GDS/Sabre versus direct, or via other smaller GDS systems.

Edit:

"The share of online and call centre sales grew by 1.5 p. p. to 36.2% in 2019 (vs 34.7% in 2018). Channel-wise, agents remain the biggest contributor to sales with 58.5%. Own sales offices accounted for 5.3% of total sales, flat year-on-year."[1]

So this is hitting that 58.5% bucket, probably most of it. Other stories say their "PSS" support is also in jeopardy, though not decided yet. If that shuts down, the airline shuts down entirely.

[1] http://ar2019.aeroflot.ru/reports/aeroflot/annual/2019/gb/En...

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The reason the big 2 do it at the same time is also that there is a very significant payment risk for any counterparty of Aeroflot at the moment. The Ruble is falling and the Swift block is making payments even harder.

So I'm guessing that demand for Aeroflot in the GDS systems is tiny at the moment.

>So I'm guessing that demand for Aeroflot in the GDS systems is tiny at the moment.

If I understand it right, the international demand would be low, but I believe even the domestic sales typically go through travel agents that use a GDS. That is, most Aeroflot customers don't buy their tickets online. I'm sure they will find a workaround, but turning off the GDS will affect even domestic sales for a short time. The travel agencies could, of course, do the booking online, but then they don't get the commission. The workaround is probably some way to pay them commission for those kind of sales.

Aeroflot already "cancelled flights to Europe" at the same time countries closed their airspace. US and Canada also don't allow Russian flights. China has their own GDS (global distribution system = travel industry term for such a system). Maybe this will push Russia to shift to using the Chinese GDS? IIRC it's TravelSky (Hong Kong listed) but http://www.travelsky.cn/ and http://www.travelsky.net/ appear to be down right now, http://www.travelsky.com.cn/ is apparent agent login (but apparently firewalls foreign IPs), so see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TravelSky

https://www.travelsky.com.cn/ works for me. It has this notice on it:

"Notice: From now on, the website URL of Xintian Youyanzhen will be changed from www.travelsky.com to www.travelsky.com.cn, and the original domain name will no longer be used."

Their online and store sales might also depend on gds system on the backend (many airlines have this kind of deal where Amadeus/Sabre take care also of inventory systems. So this might be a very big problem for them.

Yes, your direct PSS (passenger service system) or CRS (customer reservation system) could also be run by one of those two. But they aren't yet threatening to shut that down yet. So far, only the GDS bit is being turned off. There's speculation that what you're describing might happen.

Would TravelSky step in? To my very limited understanding they have a very similar offering, mostly focused on the Chinese market.

Migrating a PSS is a 3-10 year project, depending on airline size

I think pss refers to a pricing solution suite.

It's "Passenger Service System" in this context. The core of where flights are sold. Killing off different GDS systems kills off individual sales channels. Killing off PSS kills the core of where it all lives, flights, seat inventory, pricing, etc.

Passenger service system. It's the one that handles reservations and (usually) checkin.

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