A maritime flights agency is promising to revolutionise booking services for shipping, with online technology capable of finding the cheapest refundable flights available within seconds.
C Teleport founder Dmitrii Beliakov claims the agency has been growing at a rate of 100% per month since its launch last year, having picked up clients including Nordic Hamburg, Groningen Shipping and Reederei NSB.
The Latvian entrepreneur comes from a seafaring family who 15 years ago set up online crewing agency Crewplanet, which is where the idea for C Teleport was born.
Over the years, Beliakov became increasingly frustrated with the costly and time-consuming process of sourcing marine flights — a refundable booking category due to the changeable nature of voyage times and crewing requirements, which means that more than 50% of crew bookings are either cancelled or changed.
So he decided to develop his own online platform which would cut the need for travel agents, reduce costs, and be fully integrated with other systems. Beliakov drew on his experiences at Crewplanet, monitored competitors and entered talks with airlines such as KLM and Turkish Airlines to develop the new service.
Beliakov believes C Teleport, with offices in Rotterdam and Riga, offers an unrivalled service for shipping, and is creating opportunities for airlines with its new service for flexible fares.
Its software is capable of searching 350 airlines to find the best-priced air fares, and its algorithms do not just identify marine flights — but all available refundable tickets.
“The flexibility required by the marine industry requires very complex technology,” he tells TradeWinds. “But we believe we have created something that is a game changer that finds all the refundable flights.”
“We can save hundreds of euros per flight,” he said, citing an example of a booking from Riga to Manila costing €300 ($368).
C Teleport is in the process of moving its headquarters to the Netherlands to allow it to work with a greater number of airlines, Beliakov says. It is majority owned by Beliakov but also has institutional investors and is open to talks with strategic partners.
