Today’s travelers have high expectations for a fresh approach. Digital-native retailers have set a new standard for customer engagement, and the bar is only rising.
Travelers expect companies to understand their existing relationships with travel sellers and providers, their preferences, and the context of each trip. They want personalized offers and simpler journeys, from browsing to boarding—even during disruptions. They also expect seamless payment experiences.
While addressing these challenges, this trend also presents opportunities for airlines to boost customer satisfaction, capture more revenue, and stand out from competitors.
At Amadeus, we see our role as helping airlines become better retailers across all the processes we power. This is a moment to seize.
How have we been working to address these changes?
First, we have accelerated our move to the cloud—we are making significant progress and have now migrated more than 50% of our applications to the public cloud.
This is a prerequisite to enable more modularity, scalability and localization across our portfolio. The move brings more transparency, resilience and security. It creates a common framework to manage our partners, data, and events across applications and the wider travel ecosystem. It brings more openness, better integration, and easier customization, leveraging API extensibility and faster access to AI capabilities.
Alongside, we have moved from vision to action as we start delivering on Modern Airline Retailing. We made fantastic progress on Offer and Order management last year and are now proudly creating millions of orders and billions of offers for several airlines.
Our newest Amadeus Nevio partner, Air France-KLM, joins our existing Nevio customers British Airways, Finnair, and Saudia—and we have already made good progress together, presented at our recent Altitude 25 event in Lisbon. Many other airlines at the event showcased how they are transforming into more efficient and traveler-centric organizations in different ways—for instance, leveraging NDC to market more attractive offers across third-party channels; optimizing revenue; piloting new collaboration models to be able to cross-sell more easily across airlines and other travel suppliers; and improving the airport experience. Meanwhile, we expect to make good progress on our new IT suite for low-cost carriers, Navitaire Stratos, this year.
The airline industry transformation goes beyond Offers and Orders, and with regard to the latter, I am excited that we are making significant progress in Settlement and Delivery. Outpayce has launched its payments marketplace, which allows airlines to select from local payment providers, filter capabilities, check country and currency options, and track real-time transactions. Our delivery teams, after over a year of working with customers, have articulated and prioritized carriers’ needs to enable the most traveler-focused design and development of the Journey Delivery and Service Recovery modules of our new airline portfolio.
What comes next? Well, embarking on a major transformation to become a traveler-centric retailer is not an overnight journey. Wherever and whenever you want to start the journey, we will be with you, adding tangible value at every step— for you and your passengers.
Author: Cyril Tetaz
Executive Vice President, Airline Solutions, Travel unit, Amadeus
*Find out more about Amadeus' engagement in the IATA's Strategic Partnership Program on the partners directory.
