Yekaterina Dranitsyna
The St. Petersburg Times, April, 11, 2008 Reksoft software development company has completed a tourism web site, Tourgenius.ru, the company said Tuesday in a statement. The new web site aims to become a comprehensive source of information for tourists and service providers in the tourism and hospitality industry. Tourgenius.ru contains information about traveling all over the world. The site's administrators claim that as well as using the search engine, tourists can book trips online and the tickets and other documents will be delivered to them by agents. "Since it began operating, the web site has become one of the largest sources of information about travel and leisure for Russian audiences. 5,000 people visit the site every day," said Kirill Kuzmin, general manager of Tourgenius.ru. The web site includes a news section, catalogue of flight tickets and package tours and a discussion forum. Information can be searched for according to country, region, city, hotel, airport, travel company or agent, price, trip duration and other criteria. As well as photographs and official information, visitors' comments are also included. The site's founders expect that Tourgenius.ru will be popular with tourists, tour operators, hotels and airlines. They claim that the list of hotels on Tourgenius.ru is one of the largest on the Russian-language Internet. The search engine also scans information sources on the Internet to find and compare tours. In the future Tourgenius.ru will incorporate Google Maps, enabling tourists to see photographs of hotels and where they are situated. The web site will also cooperate with the Global Distribution System and a number of popular tourism web sites, and in the near future users will be able to book plane and railway tickets on-line. "This web site does not have any advantages over other tourism sites. It's a prototype of an online booking system, but the main function of ordering and paying for a trip over the Internet is not available," said Dmitry Yakovlev, software architect for travel solutions at DataArt. Yakovlev indicated that most travel web sites simply provide descriptions of trips, while users then have to contact travel companies to check if the particular offer is available and to pay for it. Among the most popular global web sites, Yakovlev listed Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz. "To create a web site on such a scale is difficult, because a number of strong brands already exist, and they spend tens of millions of dollars on marketing every year," Yakovlev said. He suggested that Tourgenius.ru could benefit from being "a niche product" focusing on Russian travelers. "A localized web site could provide Russian language content and accept credit cards issued by Russian banks and popular payment systems like Yandex Money and Web Money," Yakovlev said. He estimated the expenses of a web site offering trips, plane and railway tickets and insurance policies at several million dollars. "The pay-back period for such a project is a disputable issue. In Russia this market is just emerging, and in the near future it will grow dramatically with the expansion of the Internet, payment systems and growing incomes." Yakovlev indicated that the project's success would depend both on marketing and technical solutions. "The main risk faced by this project would result from integration with other systems and their compatibility. The quality of information and need for manual and semi-automatic prior data-processing is also important," he said. The first businesses to enter this market are likely to gain the advantage, the expert said. "The idea of selling trips, hotel reservations and plane tickets via the Internet is flourishing right now. New companies are entering this market, and the company with the best team will win the market," Yakovlev said. |