Amadeus Cytric Travel & Expense, an end-to-end solution for corporate travel managers, is now available for businesses in Asia.
According to Albert Pozo, president at Amadeus Asia Pacific, this is the first fully integrated travel management tool that incorporates the entire corporate travel process, including hotel and flight booking, duty of care, travel policy, reimbursement, expense reporting, and more, under one platform accessible via desktop, mobile and tablet.
With the launch of Cytric, corporates can directly access Amadeus’ GDS inventory without having to go through an agent or TMC. Travel managers can also easily enable their travellers to book trips themselves while using Cytric to ensure bookings are made within standing travel policy frameworks.
Essentially, the solution empowers companies to be able to cost-effectively self-manage their work trips. The ability to cancel bookings, compare fares, alter flight seatings, input corporate negotiated rates, and more, can all be done within the system.
Quick to address the continued need for TMCs is Frederic Saunier, head of corporate IT at Amadeus Asia Pacific, who said: “Amadeus will never become a TMC. The ability to serve the traveller who is on the road is something we will never do.”
He points to the fact that corporates can choose to merely utilise the expense management portion of the solution while still allowing TMCs to manage travel bookings for them.
The Cytric solution however, does encroach into territory long established by TMCs and may be disruptive to them in the same way OTAs have been to offline agents.
Furthermore, Amadeus has also unveiled plans to enhance the service for its corporate clients who choose to utilise the solution. In the pipeline include direct integration with Outlook to book trips using an email message or a calendar plugin (available by early 2017) as well as the ability to use Google’s voice assistant to perform bookings on mobile.
While nothing is confirmed, Amadeus also alluded to the possibility of adding sharing economy content the likes of Uber and Airbnb into the system at some point.
