Amadeus Homing In On Airport It: Travel Tech

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TRAVEL TECH

Amadeus homing in on airport IT

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation

Erding, Germany, Nice, France

Leading transactions processor also eyes greater share in Asia-Pacific markets

ERDING: -- The world's leading travel transactions processor, Amadeus, plans to increase revenue from Asia-Pacific and expand its focus to catch up with the "airport IT" as its new concentrated market area.

Eberhard Haag, executive vice president of Amadeus Operations, said the company aims to increase the proportion of transactions from Asia-Pacific from the current 20 per cent, to 40 per cent by 2020-22. Asia-Pacific is the most important market for Amadeus. Currently, one-third of more than 91,000 travel agency points of sales worldwide, which use the Amadeus global distribution system (GDS), are based in Asia-Pacific. And, more than 80 of Amadeus's total 430 airlines bookable in the Amadeus system worldwide are in Asia-Pacific.

Also, Asia-Pacific has been the world's largest air-travel market since 2009. At the time it had 647 million passengers while 638 million were in North America. Also, this region is predicted to account for more than a third of global travel by 2020. In 2010, airlines in Asia-Pacific carried 185 million international passengers.

Amadeus Asia-Pacific regional's headquarters located in Bangkok will be the centre to expand business throughout the region.

"We have more than 1,600 employees in 39 markets in the Asia-Pacific region. For the Asia-Pacific region, we have fully staffed support in the local time zone to deliver 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It recently opened a small data centre in Singapore to run third-party applications," said Haag.

Amadeus' two key business units are travel distribution, providing a global distribution system to travel agents to book travel content; and IT solutions for the whole travel industry - airline IT, e-commerce solutions, hotel IT solutions, and corporate travel solutions. Its IT solutions are used by travel agents to book travel content such as air tickets, hotels, insurance, car hire, cruises, and rail tickets.

"We invest more in Asia Pacific than any other travel technology company. Since 2004, we have invested €1.8 billion [bt70 billion] in R&D globally," said Haag.

Two main business units

Haag said the company's two highly synergistic and profitable businesses are GDS and IT solutions. Its flagship IT solution for airlines is the Amadeus Altéa Customer Management System that helps airlines manage passenger processes more efficiently and with superior customer service.

"Amadeus is the cloud for travel and tourism industry. We are on the way to virtualisation and cloud operation. We have already deployed [private] cloud for developers that saves a lot of time. They can get in, test and then deploy applications in a short time," said Haag.

Amadeus Altéa is a new technology platform for airlines, transforming airlines' operations with the three main systems - reservation (customer profiles, availability, bookings, fares and pricing, ticketing and e-ticketing), inventory (inventory control schedule management, re-accommodation, seating management), and departure control (check-in, boarding pass issuance, baggage management, aircraft weight and balance).

The concept of the Amadeus Altéa system is to facilitate airports - from booking to boarding - designed around 5 core concepts: community-based platform, single data source, customer-centric, automated and flexible, and modular designed for change. Currently, there are 120 airlines contracted, representing more than 715 million boarded passengers.

He added that the company has been focusing on research and development in order to keep its competitive advantage.

"Our industry is dynamic and ever-changing," said Haag.

Datacentre is the heart of tech solutions

The key to the success of the powerful IT systems provided by Amadeus is its datacentre, which is located in Erding, Germany.

At peak time, Amadeus's datacentre can support more than 1 billion transactions per day and can support over 17,000 transactions per second. Normally, there are over 3.7 million bookings per day.

"Our capacity grows 30 per cent year on year," said Haag.

It has 10 petabytes of storage that can support over 4,000 IT changes per month, 400 application-software loads per month, and more than 500,000 database access per second.

"We have more than 560 employees in the data centre here in Erding," said Haag.

Amadeus is the only travel technology company that runs its own data centre, which can process 10,000-plus user queries per second. It processed 948 million travel transactions last year. It processes more than 1 billion travel transaction every day, more than 3 million net travel bookings every day, and more than 20,000 end-user requests per second. It can store 8 petabytes.

Last year, the company carried out 984 million transactions. It earned revenue of €2.712 billion. In 2010, it invested €349 million in research and development in travel technology development.

Currently, Amadeus is offering IT solutions to 693 airlines, 23 insurance companies, over 50 cruise and ferry lines, 203 tour operators, over 100,000 hotels, 30 car-rental companies, 103 railways, over 90,000 travel agencies' point of sales, and over 60,000 airlines sales offices. More than 260 websites of over 100 airlines are using Amadeus's e-commerce solutions, while 120 of the world's top airlines are using its airline IT platform.

Airport tech a targeted market

However, social changes are impacting airlines and airports. John Jarrell, head of Airport IT at Amadeus, said that airport technology is playing an increasing role in the change. The airport has long been a primary point of service delivery for travellers undertaking a total trip, which encompasses a wide variety of stages - from booking to destination.

According to a new industry report released in June 2012, called "Reinventing the Airport Ecosystem", technologies like near field communication (NFC) and radio frequency identification (RFID) would play an important role in enhancing airport services. With 85 per cent of the world's population now receiving mobile coverage, global availability of personal mobile technology will change forever the way aviation players interact with and sell to tomorrow's traveller.

Passengers require more automated processes, which offer speed, convenience and ease of use, all of which are possible with advancements in customer-centric technologies such as remote check-in, NFC devices, electronic passports, and bag tags. If airports deployed NFC sensors throughout the airport, it would maximise ease of check-in for the passenger, and could even enable airlines to track their passengers through the airport, achieving greater efficiencies. Meanwhile, RFID technology will enable real-time baggage information.

Amadeus's Altéa Departure Control-Customer Management is the new-generation solution that has been designed to automate as much as possible all airport processes - from check-in to disruption. It enables airlines to support 100 per cent self-service check-in as well as enhance the passenger experience through differentiated customer service.

"By 2020, there will be 50 billion connected devices enabling interactions with every object," said Jarrell.

He added that Amadeus is committed to the aviation industry. It assists the airports to reposition the airports and airport actors in the service provider chain to passengers; and helps the overall community including airlines, airports and airport actors to be more efficient. Finally, it helps increase passenger satisfaction and reduces anxiety and disruptions.

"Our IT solutions for the airport target multiple actors - airport authorities, ground handlers, airlines, and the other airport operators, including catering, fuel, de-icing, security, and shops," said Jarrell.

He said currently, airports' IT spending is about 4 per cent of revenue estimated at €2.4 billion per year. Importantly, according to the US State Information Technology Agency survey, about 60 per cent of the airports are planning to have major IT upgrades.

"We have a huge database of passengers. We know all the flights touching the airports when they were created up to 365 days before. We know from the time a reservation is created which passengers are coming and when they are coming, and their purchasing pattern. We can deliver services directly to passengers, informing them from the time they reserve their journey until they return to the airport," said Jarrell.

Amadeus at a glance

Established: 1987 in Europe

Headquarters:

_ Global - Madrid, Spain

_ Asia Pacific - Bangkok, Thailand

Global R&D centre:

_ Nice, France

_ Presence in over 195 countries

_ 10,000 employees

_ 15 R&D centres

_ 73 local Amadeus commercial organisations

_ Four regional offices

_ Three central sites

-- The Nation 2012-08-07