MOSCOW, RUSSIA - Aviasales –one of the world’s leading travel metasearch platforms– has announced that starting immediately Anton Baitsur has been named as Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
Anton has been with Aviasales for over six years in various Executive Management roles, including as Chief Operating Officer (COO) and most recently as the Vice President of Product.
Meanwhile Max Kraynov, CEO of Aviasales from 2011 to 2021 and a member of its Board, has now been appointed as Chairman of the Board starting immediately.
During Max’s successful tenure as CEO, the active audience of Aviasales has exceeded 15 million users monthly and today roughly 17 percent of all the flight bookings in Russia originate with Aviasales – whilst gross merchandise sales volume for 2021 are estimated to be more than $1.6 billion.
Max Kraynov, Chairman of Aviasales comments: “I’d like to thank the whole team and all our partners for their support, loyalty and hard work in making Aviasales the leading metasearch in Russia since we founded the business in 2011.
“I´m very excited to move into my new role as Chairman and look forward to watching Anton drive our business to the next level.”
Anton Baitsur, CEO of Aviasales added: “It’s a great honour to take on this role and on behalf of all the employees and our partners I would like to thank Max for his hard work and vision in driving our sales to what will reach $1.6 billion this year.
“Leveraging our market leading position and supported by our recent fundraising, I´m going to focus on launching new products, accelerate growth across international and domestic markets, build our corporate travel service and develop further Travelpayouts, our automated affiliate marketing programme.”
Earlier this year Aviasales completed a series B fundraising round worth $43M, led by iTech Capital and Elbrus Capital.
The funds are already being used to launch new products and accelerate growth across international and domestic markets.
This financing is also supporting further development of Aviasales’ corporate travel service and Travelpayouts, a leading global platform for automated affiliate marketing that is operated by Aviasales.