Amadeus
Globe-Trotting on a Budget

The economy of today has become a technology-fueled one with instant gratification, causing a major upswing in the travel and hospitality sectors. Businesses in these sectors have to keep inventing new methods to refine their end-user offerings just to stay ahead of the game and not arrive at a point of stagnation. Airline carriers are the poster child as they are impelled to provide new and affordable services for air travellers with as much customization as possible. In this economy-driven race of innovation, easyJet rules the skies as Europe’s fifth largest airline with 68 million passengers boarding annually. As one of the pioneers of direct booking and ancillary revenue models, easyJet caught on early to the lucrativeness of the corporate travel market. With an exceedingly large number of business and first class bookings generated through the indirect channel, easyJet found themselves lacking the traditional booking elements of inclusive and flexi fares for the business travellers. Amadeus, the leading global distribution system (GDS) for the travel industry, offered the airline its corporate self-booking tool, the Amadeus eTravel Management enabling them to include the new fares that were designed exclusively for the business market. To introduce their offer to the target markets, easyJet opted for a trial run of Amadeus Ticketless Access. The unique solution helped the airline offer real-time fares and availability without ticketing, BSP or fare filling costs while keeping connectivity simple.

As Amadeus helped easyJet get off to a good start in corporate travel, they collaborated on a joint project to accelerate the growth of corporate bookings using Amadeus Light Ticketing flow. In a market by market approach, they appointed Amadeus personnel as low-cost carrier market champions, placing them in easyJet’s target markets, to drive further adoption through education and training programs with travel management companies and corporate partners. The coalition of easyJet and Amadeus in their business and technology offerings ushered in year-on-year growth for the leading airline.

“Travel powers progress. Amadeus powers travel,” is a quote that best illustrates what Spain-based Amadeus offers in its range of solutions and services for the travel industry. Built on the premise of designing a better future of travel, Amadeus moves the industry forward with critical solutions to help all facets of travel and hospitality.

The global travel provider offers an agile, integrated travel management tool in the form of Amadeus cytric Travel & Expense that equips businesses with the ability to supervise over their travel programs, including planning, booking, expense submission and reimbursement. Underpinned by a synergy of unparalleled content, technology, and expertise at hand, it ensures smooth running of a corporation’s finance processes while driving business performance. Hosted on Amadeus’ open and flexible platform, the solution delivers a simplified user experience while making it easier to define travel policies, including preferred vendors and negotiated rates. An accurate overview of all direct costs on travel and hospitality helps with budgeting and cost control. The tool comes with a full set of services to help prepare teams for their implementation of Amadeus cytric Travel & Expense. On-site experts further simplify the transition phases, tracking the corporation’s return on investment by tallying online bookings and savings with offline ones with reports on the progress of their online adoption.

Apart from cost savings in the planning and bookings arena, a versatile flight activity plan is crucial to monitoring finances as well. This is where Amadeus Amadeus Altea Departure Control–Flight Management comes in handy with a highly flexible flight activity plan that allows customization of flight level and automatic initiation of already scheduled activities. It is a flight management application for automating aircraft load control while optimizing fuel for flight departures by analyzing passenger and cargo load with increased precision. Its novel graphical user interface (GUI) allows both airlines and ground handlers to supervise multiple carriers from the same application screen.

The solution automates alerts for any activity requiring special attention, including accurate Estimated Zero Fuel Weight (EZFW), detailed allocation of passenger weight, and optimized aircraft load distribution. Ramp staff can access GUI-generated load instruction reports on mobile tablets in real time.

Amadeus has an entire gamut of solutions for the travel industry among which Amadeus Destination Insight Navigator enables a corporation to gather individual traveller behaviour to build stronger marketing campaigns. It delivers extremely detailed insights into the planning, purchasing, and travel behaviors of travellers worldwide, sourced from billions of travel agency bookings. Tailoring marketing campaigns around specific demands of potential travellers becomes easier, driving the most impact out of marketing expenses. The insights help in optimizing the timing of the campaigns, with detailed analysis to better serve booked passengers. In-depth historical data is key to zeroing in on traveller demand, with the data being broken down into a helpful, intelligibile format. Amadeus Destination Insight Navigator allows destination marketing organizations and tourism boards to monitor their marketing campaign results, adapt to fluctuating demands in market while helping gain the better hand against competitors with comparison of regional performance with them.

In the battle to minimize energy costs through improved operational efficiency, airlines rely on their load control system to produce an accurate EZFW calculation to load fuel in the correct amount. The traditional way to go about this was to calculate fuel figures, transmit them electronically to a crew briefing room for the captain to confirm it after reading, and finally transmit the figures to the load controller to input them into the DCS system. This is, in essence, is a time consuming, decentralized process with the added risk of errors in manual data entry, where automated, centralized load control makes more sense. Finnair, the largest airline of Finland, was determined to address this from the get go, which led to them to outsource the entire load control operation to two centralized hubs. Among them, Finnair passed the reins to Air Dispatch in one of the hubs for overseeing the European load control operations. They collaborated with Finnair to set up Amadeus’ Altea Departure Control–Flight Management across the Finnair network. The next generation load control system allowed Air Dispatch direct transmission into the DCS system, reducing both time and error. The newly implemented process of managing flights in two centralized load control centres helped improve productivity to a great extent. Amadeus’ solution produced more precise estimations of zero fuel weight calculations, reducing error records by a massive 48.5 percent while saving costs with greater fuel efficiency. The migration experience to the new system equipped Air Dispatch with a unique skillset that they were able to offer other airline clients, establishing them as a key partner for implementation of Amadeus Altea Departure Control–Flight Management. Ever since Air Dispatch started working with the flight management solution, they routed over 99.9 percent on-time departures.

With the knowledge that travel and hospitality go hand in hand, Amadeus offers its range of service optimization solutions primarily targeting hotel brands across the world. For hoteliers worldwide, the company’s cloud-based, service optimization enterprise product HotSOS helps solve minor issues that are negatively impacting guests’ experience before they become expensive problems. A combination of automated dispatch of operational and guest requests, and streamlined workflow operations, helps increase efficiency while reducing costs and wait times. The product allows to build profiles and personalize experiences based on guest history of requests and preferences, which would in turn enhance operational decision-making to ensure that guests enjoy their time.

For hospitality teams of all sizes and service levels, Amadeus’ Sales and Event Management software is the go to solution to help drive in group sales by selling, organizing, and managing events efficiently. It allows teams to effectively manage and qualify incoming leads, and identifying need periods to improve function space utilization, simultaneously improving customer relationship management, communication, and prospecting. The software enables teams to collaborate with their planner and internal teams to document all event logistics of anything from a small board meeting to a social event or a complex multi-day function. During the entire event process, Amadeus’ sales and catering software helps understand group business performance including successes and efficiencies to help make improvements as they go.

As Amadeus grows in tandem with the rapidly evolving travel industry, the company ups its game by evolving from a GDS to a Live Travel Space to meet the ever-changing expectations of their customers. It is an open and dynamic network for travel industry leaders where they can interact and co-create to deliver an unparalleled experience to travellers. The Live Travel Space goes beyond being just a technology platform, it is a partnership between Amadeus and their clients that will help them deliver personalized, unique solutions, creating more value for every traveller.

One of the most defining characteristics of Amadeus in the travel industry is their increased level of focus on personalization and merchandizing technology. “We empower travel providers to provide travellers precisely what they want, when they want it, and at every step of their trip,” says Luis Maroto, president and CEO of Amadeus. “We bring together the entire industry providers, intermediaries and sellers, and give people more ideas, more options, and more control over their journeys.”