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Galileo pushes e-ticketing

Galileo is now offering e-ticketing capability for over 190 airlines across 94 countries, with over a dozen more in progress and twenty plus in its contractual pipeline. It is expected that most of the remaining carriers will express an interest in achieving e-ticket capability, in order to meet IATA’s deadline in 2008. Galileo was the industry’s first GDS provider to introduce e-ticketing which now represents 80% of all tickets issued on its system, saving a minimum of 14 acres of forest per month.
With each e-ticket implementation, Galileo has fine-tuned its process in terms of the types of technical questions posed to the carrier to identify the exact testing its system requires.  By gaining insight into which strategies work with each airline system, the customer’s expectations are easily managed.
On summarising the e-ticketing implementation experience from a GDS perspective, Mr Brad Holman, Galileo’s President and Managing Director for Asia Pacific said, “E -ticketing crosses multiple applications and can be both complex and time consuming.  To date, we have worked with over forty different e-ticket servers each with slightly different processing requirements albeit to the same end.  However, this has provided us with additional learning experiences which have improved efficiencies and delivery times.  As a result, we now have 97% of our top ticket volume producers, e-ticket enabled. “
Galileo has recently implemented e-ticketing agreements with a number of Asian airlines including Indian Airlines, Philippine Airlines, Air Vanuatu, Biman Bangladesh, Air Pacific, Solomon Airlines, Vietnam Airlines, Air India, Air China, China Eastern Airlines, and Lao Airlines.  The addition of China Eastern, Hainan Airlines, Shandong Airlines, Shanghai Airlines and Xiamen Airlines has just been announced with the language skills of the Galileo APAC team invaluable in interpreting needs and championing carriers to continue to move towards activation. 
In the Pacific, Galileo provides e-ticketing capability for 82 airlines in Australia and 45 airlines in New Zealand.
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