11/08/2019 16:56

Airline Companies were not Given Tickets

[IMG=18209-3681] Russian airline companies which have been receiving consignments of airline tickets from foreign printers recently faced an obstacle: customs bodies did not let them across the border. The reason for it is in the Finance Ministry of the Russian Federation letter published as far back as on September 15, according to which airline forms are regarded as counterfeit protected printing products. Today carriers must get a special license from the Ministry of Economic Development to order these forms abroad, and this procedure will take months on the run. Quite few operators decide to use the services of Russian printers as they, according to the experts’ estimates, do not have necessary equipment. ‘A small part of tickets for internal flights is printed by the Transport Clearing Chamber on its forms, but we are, first and foremost, an international carrier, and we must observe respective standards,’ says Irina Dannenberg, the head of the Aeroflot press-service. Today airline companies operate using their stores of forms. ‘We have enough of them for some time, our stocks are good,’ says Sergey Bykhal, the PR Director of the Transaero Airline Company, in particular. ‘We hope to solve this problem by the time when our resources are exhausted.’ Dmitry Gorin, the Inna Tour General Director, is sure that Russian airline companies will not be in trouble. ‘Things are different with foreign airline companies,’ he stated to the BANKO reporter, ‘Their stores of forms are not big, since they import them in small consignments.’ According to Mr. Gorin, the Finance Ministry decision will affect the companies which will not be able to operatively follow new Russian initiatives. Experts agree that airline ticket forms were mistakenly recognized as a category of printing products the import of which requires a special license. At present the airline companies’ leaders involved lawyers in their attempts to negotiate the review of the resolution with the Finance Ministry, but the results of the negotiations are not predictable yet. Yet, even now one could say that if the solution of the problem is delayed it would create an unprecedented situation. ‘It is hard to imagine what could happen,’ Aram Antonyan, the Bolero Tour General Director, admitted to the BANKO reporter. He believes that travel agencies will be the first to suffer from the Finance Ministry’s innovations: Aeroflot, for instance will use its store of forms for its own booking offices, first and foremost.