Igor Kopmar: “Our Customers Will Get Maximal Benefits with Minimal Effort”

This week, the team of designers and IT developers at RH Travel made significant changes to some pages of AgentSky.net, the company's B2B platform for searching and booking airline tickets. The updates affected a key section of the site—the pages displaying search results based on parameters set by travel agents. Igor Kopmar, founder and CEO of RH Travel, Inc., discusses the reasons for these changes and the expected impact.

Q: Igor, at first glance, the new design of AgentSky aligns with the global trend set by popular AI assistants.

A: Thank you for the comparison, though we did not aim to resemble ChatGPT or Claude.

Q: It's not about the appearance of the pages but rather the new ideology behind the search results. Instead of displaying hundreds of travel options from point A to point B, your platform provides the agent with just three options for three main classes: the cheapest flight, the fastest, and the most optimal. It's like comparing Google's and Perplexity.ai's answers to the same question. The first search engine lists links to millions of pages on the internet, while the second provides a brief but substantial answer to a specific question.

A: With such a comparison, we are indeed following the global trend. But that's the reality—today, the accuracy of information and the time spent obtaining it are highly valued. I would add another aspect—the convenience of searching and using the obtained information.

Understanding the relevance of all these needs prompted us to rethink the long-established way of working with clients. We decided not only to improve the usability of AgentSky.net but also to significantly reduce the time needed to choose the right flight.

Q: Everything seemed to be working fine, no one complained. Why change anything?

A: RH Travel has been in the airline industry since 1992, and over more than three decades, the ticket search process has evolved significantly—from phone calls with agents and airlines to the automatic processing of vast amounts of travel content provided by the world's leading GDS. For many years, we took pride in AgentSky's ability to display multi-page lists with hundreds of offers for various popular destinations at the request of agents. But recently, we asked ourselves: do our agents really need such a sea of information? And are they not drowning in it?

We studied the accumulated data and analyzed the typical behavior of platform visitors—for example, what filters they use to narrow down search results, how many offers they view, and how much time they spend choosing the most suitable flights.

Q: And what did you find out?

A: As expected, price filtering is the most in-demand in the mass air travel market, in all classes. Then come the total flight duration, the number of stops, and other conditions.

If so, let's immediately show the most in-demand options in the search results—“Lowest Fares,” “Shortest Time,” and “Recommended Options”. This way, we save agents from having to filter and scan all other options themselves. As a result, clients get the best deals and maximal benefits with minimal effort.

Q: What if someone has a very specific request related to a particular airline or departure time? Are the additional options still available?

A: Of course. For example, when choosing the cheapest option in economy class, a list of all other available flights sorted by price opens up. There is also a wide range of various filters that allow for more fine-tuned search results.

Overall, I am very pleased with the work of our international team of designers and programmers. The main search results page now looks much more attractive and informative, the key search results are prominently displayed even in the mobile version, and navigation has become so intuitively simple that getting lost among a few buttons is practically impossible. I hope our clients will like the updates on AgentSky.

Q: One last question: was artificial intelligence used in this work after all?

A: Of course, but that's a topic for another conversation.

In the photo: Travel agents can work with the updated AgentSky.net search system on both desktop computers and mobile devices. Photo: Pexels.com