Starting next summer Air Canada will have flights to Hungary on a daily basis

Passengers prefer relevant, personalised, constantly contacted and uninterrupted travel experiences – reveals Travelport’s event, on which debuted Air Canada, which will operate with daily flights to Budapest from next summer on, and Hertz car rental.

According to turizmusonline.hu, Travelport and its two partners, Air Canada Rouge airline and Hertz car rental presented their planned innovations on a professional breakfast. Stanislav Fajkus, from the Canadian airline’s and the global car rental’s regional representative’s Globair’s Prague office told us that Air Canada celebrated its 80^th anniversary this year. They fly 374 airplanes to 200 destinations.

The airline’s new brand, Air Canada Rouge debuted in 2012, which operates flights primarily to holiday destinations.

These can be found mostly in the US, in the Caribbean Region, Mexico, and Europe. In our area, besides Budapest, the airline flies to Prague and Warsaw during summer period. Boeing 767-300 type airplanes fly to Budapest, and these airplanes do not have a business class, but passengers can pick from two types of higher classes and one type of normal tourist seat and service package.

Inflight WiFi can soon be used on each plane of the fleet. The airline has two collection and distribution centres, one of which can be found in Toronto and the other in Montréal. In Toronto, passengers to the US can undergo prior border and custom controls, so that when arriving in the US, they can go on as if they had arrived with a domestic airplane. At the same time, it is important to know that even transfer passengers need the so-called eTA in case of Canada, and ESTA in case of the US. ETA can be requested for only 7 CAD on ww.cig.gc.ca. They also provide a stopover program, which can be used if the waiting time exceeds 6 hours.

On board, travellers can enjoy a selection of entertaining programmes on their own laptops or tablets.

Next year the first flight from Toronto to Budapest will leave on the 5^th of April, much earlier than this year, and the frequency of the flights will also be increased: first 3, then 5 flights a week, eventually, from the middle of June the flights will operate on a daily basis.

We found out in connection with Hertz car rental that global brands like 5Dollar, Thrifty or Firefly all belong to them. Travel agencies can find the rental’s offer in their GDS or on Yellow Mouse’s online reservation system. The company provides business travellers with special offers and discounts can be found in the Hertz Lite program.

Balázs Bíró, Manager of Travelport provided information on the company’s mobile developments, the goal of which is the enhancement of customer experience. As he mentioned, travel agencies face numerous challenges: routes are increasingly complex, new competitors appeared, such as OTB, Concur, the providers’ own pages, and intermediate operators (Travelfusion).  Fix costs are too high, brand loyalty is too low and the profit per passenger is declining. Therefore our goal is to “seize” the passenger and keep them on our own platform starting from search to the reservation and evaluation of the service after their return.

Travelport has entered the market with several new developments.

One of these is Branded fares, which provides a summary of the components of each available service package from 200 airlines on a graphic interface and, on request, shows them in one single matrix.

Agencies will prefer Travelport’s new EMD Manager function which makes it possible to take extra fees on a graphic platform and the new offer creation tool, called Trip Quote copy, which is easy to use.

Another new improvement is The Smartbutton application, with the help of which the agent is able to automatize recurring workflows. From December, Viewtrip Mobile application will be available for passengers to download. It can be very useful, since it sends messages about flight delays, cancellations, or any other changes without request, and additional services are also accessible.

Translated by Blanka Marianna Györgyi

Featured image: www.facebook.com/AirCanada

Ce: bm

Source: http://turizmusonline.hu/