Unisys Corporation and TravelSky, a leading provider of IT solutions for China’s air travel and tourism industry, have signed a deal that will allow the latter to expand its processing capacity for cargo bookings, load calculations and passenger reservations to support the aviation sector’s recovery.

Under the contract, signed in the fourth quarter of 2020, Unisys will upgrade and expand TravelSky’s processing capacity with the addition of advanced technology, powered by ClearPath® OS 2200 software.

Unisys ClearPath Forward® technology is a secure and reliable platform to process critical business transactions, including passenger reservations, cargo bookings and load calculations.

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The partnership also includes application development services to ‘cloud-enable’ the Unisys Open Message Switching Engine (OMSE)—a communications front end that allows travel agencies, airline reservation offices and external systems to communicate with the TravelSky systems.

The new technology will provide TravelSky with expanded processing capacity to support China’s aviation industry as it rapidly recovers from the impact of COVID-19. The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) reported that China saw 13.26 million air trips during the eight-day National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival holiday in October 2020, recovering to 91.07 percent of the same period in 2019.

“TravelSky maintains and operates several critical passenger and cargo solutions used by China’s air travel and tourism industries including the Global Distribution System (GDS), Reservation System (RES), Departure and Cargo systems,” said Li Jingsong, senior vice president at TravelSky.

“As China’s aviation industry continues to rapidly recover after COVD-19, the additional processing capacity within the scalable, secure and flexible ClearPath Forward environment will enable us to process more transactions—such as reservations and load calculations critical to flight safety—quickly and securely,” he added.

The solution for TravelSky leverages the ‘unmatched’ security of the ClearPath Forward operating environment—the only one on the market from which data has never been forcibly extracted, Unisys noted.

“As China leads the global recovery of the aviation sector, Unisys ClearPath Forward technology provides TravelSky with the supporting IT infrastructure that has the flexibility, security and robust capacity to meet changing demands in logistics, passenger services and other mission-critical applications,” said Andrew Whelan, vice president of client management, Unisys Asia Pacific.