Aeroflot to sell tickets through Icelandic metasearch service

Russia’s largest air carrier Aeroflot has signed a cooperation agreement with Iceland’s travel search engine website Dohop. The Reykjavik-based company reports that it has made 119 of Aeroflot’s destinations in 51 countries available through its website.

Visitors are offered to book their flight via a travel agency (in which case they get the more attractive price), or directly from Aeroflot. In the latter case, the user is forwarded to the airline’s website to continue with the transaction.

Earlier this year, Dohop started working with the air ticket searching, booking and price comparison service of Russia’s largest search engine Yandex. Under the partnership agreement, the Icelandic joint venture will make its content available to users of the Russian service, ticket.yandex.

Anna Kozko, a manager at ticket.yandex, says the partnership is unique on the metasearch market because this segment is normally about competition, not cooperation. Still, Kozko hopes that both parties will benefit.

Launched in 2004, Dohop offers about 350,000 tickets with 1,000 airlines weekly.

The service works with a number of Russian operators, including S7 Airlines, Nordavia, Yakutia, Yamal, UTair Aviation, Ural Airlines, and Aeroflot’s sister companies OrenAir and Pobeda.