FROM its traditional core in travel distribution, Amadeus has been steadily diversifying its core business to airline technology, hotel bookings and payments, and has been actively beefing up its acquisition portfolio in recent years.
“We have always been very stringent with creating business very adjacent to our core technology in distribution, data centre, etc,” Holger Taubmann, senior vice president, distribution at Amadeus told TTG Asia e-Daily.
“Now we’re going into similar transaction-based businesses in the airline IT world, and the next thing we’re trying to do is give the same distribution tools to hotels,” he said.
“A fair bit of our business is coming from selling hotel bookings. We are extending that into hotel IT, which is a similar move as we have done on the airline side, going from the distribution part down to the core IT of a hotel,” he added.
Payment is another focus area that the travel technology giant has its attention on, explained Alex Luzarraga, vice president, corporate strategy at Amadeus. “Payments are in a revolution, in particular in Asia. More and more applications are based in the mobile space for payments and (many of these are) in its infancy because it’s so much related to new technologies. In parallel, we have also created a payment unit in Amadeus.”
Albert Pozo, president of Amadeus Asia-Pacific, commented: “Going forward, it’s not just working very closely with airlines but also payment providers, airport solutions, etc. It’s about taking a 360 degree view of the industry and trying to create synergy and connecting the dots for different parts of the industry.”
Amid its diversification drive, personalisation hence offers a compelling differentiator for Amadeus in a diverse geographical region as Asia-Pacific, which is home to such massive population centres as India and China to countries like Indonesia which calls for specific local content.
“Amadeus is going more and more into adapting our technology proposition to the regional or country market’s needs,” said Luzarraga. “(With technology) we now have this window to interact with the traveller at any stage of the experience, and this is fostering new opportunities and ways of bringing value to the traveller experience in Asia.”
At the same time, the growing wave of innovation among smaller players and entrepreneurs in the travel technology field has played nicely into Amadeus’ diversification cards, as the company seeks to foster new and original ideas in travel through its various initatives.
In addition to Amadeus Ventures, which was launched to provide early-stage minority investments for travel startups that have technology as a backbone, the global travel technology leader has also set up Amadeus Next, a programme that is run from Bangkok to nurture, mentor and partner with travel startups in Asia-Pacific.
Said Luzarraga: “(Asia’s) a very fresh market where things happen faster than other regions with more inertia as players (there) have been established for very long, (and) here you have a mix of lots of new travellers and new travel providers, distributers and specialised players who want to start things from scratch.”
