Websites of hotel and ticket booking

International sites of hotel and ticket booking

Expedia.com (10.2 million visitors per month). The portal’s logo is ‘Make your journey’. The portal gives an opportunity to compare prices of different airlines and buy tickets and tours, to book a hotel and rent a car. Here you will find all the instruments for planning and buying of a full-fledged travel. In 2006 the portal was awarded by Webby Award as ‘the best site for travelers’. The portal has localized sites in 15 countries.

Travel.yahoo.com (9.5 million visitors per month). The site allows booking hotels, cars, tours and buying tickets on-line. There is everything for traveling — reviews, articles, weather forecasts for regions and currency conversions.

Tripadvisor.com (8.6 million visitors per month). This is a universal site for travel planning. It allows to book hotels and plane tickets, but on the whole the site is devoted to providing user-information content: stories and notes about traveling.

Travelocity.com (5.5 million visitors per month). A lot of services for travelers, including the search of the cheapest tickets are available here. You can book a hotel and rent a car. The site belongs to Sabre Company, a global distributive system, through which tickets are booked. There are localized sites in 36 countries.

Priceline.com (5.5 million visitors per month). This site allows to search for the biggest discounts for plane tickets, hotel booking, renting cars, ect.

Kayak.com (5.1 million visitors per month). A search engine that collects information about cheap tickets, hotels and car rent from more than 100 sites including Expedia.com, Airfair.com и Hotwire.com.

Orbitz.com (4.2 million visitors per month). The site provides visitors with information about cheap tickets, hotels and auto rental. Here you can also order or buy everything you need.

Information about the cheapest plane tickets and hotels you can find in Сheaptickets.com (2.4 million visitors per month) and Сheapflights.co.uk (2.3 million visitors per month).

IATA (International Air Transport Association) which consists of 260 airlines that exercise 94% of all air transportation has issued statistics showing that in 2006 the share of electronic tickets from the whole amount of the sold tickets was 70%, and in April 2008 it reached 94.4%. From June of 2008 all the members of LATA switched to electronic tickets for 100% (Russian companies members of LATA are Aefoflot and S7).

Russian sites of hotel and ticket booking

The total volume of Internet-payments in travel-sector in Runet (sale of plane tickets and travel services) figured up to 1 billion dollars in 2008. Increase in market of electronic tickets for 2007 — 2008 is 300%, and via Internet — 450%. In 2010 in Russia 30—40% of all the sales of airlines will fall on sales of electronic tickets. And turnover of electronic tickets will be not less than 10 billion dollars.

Buying of tickets and browsing of timetables is available at the site Российские железные дороги (Russian Railways). For several destinations the system of electronic check-in in a train has been already implemented. In this case you don’t have to buy out a paper ticket after you’`ve paid on the site.

You can buy or book tickets on the websites of the big airlines and websites for travellers. There are also portals that specialize exactly on the plane tickets sales, they can help you to invent a difficult rout and will offer a change. The mechanism of ticket searching can differ from site to site and it depends on GDS (Global Distribution System) they work on.

Poezdka.ru. This is the site of Russian Business Travel Agency. GDS is Galileo. On the site you can find and book tickets and hotels. The search checks available places on thousand of flights in hundreds of airlines, finds out their cost and shows the results, sorting them by price. The site also provides a search of difficult routs. With its help you can see price and book plane tickets from Moscow to London with return To Moscow from Paris or for a flight Moscow-New York-Paris-Barselona-Moscow. The site provides an opportunity to book a suit in forty five thousand hotels all over the world.

Pososhok.ru. This is the site of Infinity Travel Agency. GDS — Galileo. The project was created to help travelers in planning their trips and buying tickets for a good price on-line.

e-ticket.ru. Rusaero Agensy. The payment is made through the on-line electronic payments system. The site works on the base of Gabriel system. There are plane tickets on flights only from Moscow

Travel.ru (GDS — Amadeus). This is a universal site of travel planning. The site provide services of booking plane tickets, train tickets, hotel booking, ect.

Also not so long ago site tutu.ru has started selling plane tickets. The site shows timetables of suburban trains. There are more than one million visitors per month.