TECHNOLOGY: In development - Amadeus (Sep 24)

Francois Laburthe, Amadeus' operational research and innovation director, tells ABTN about current and future trends driving research and development into new and exciting products 

There is little doubt that the travel and technology industries are coming together more each day. Travel technology providers such as Amadeus, Travelport and Sabre have emerged as influential players with new innovations being announced at an astonishing rate.

The focus of many now is mobile technology, a "hot topic" seen by many as a new way to reach customers at every stage of the travel process. Mobile devices are seen by some as lucrative new sales channels, while travel management companies and agents are upping the flow of targeted, location-specific information to and from the client.

Francois Laburthe

But with the world's industries still reeling from the effects of the economic slowdown it is easy to imagine that many travel technology providers could be inclined to move money away from new research and development (R&D).

Francois Laburthe, operational research and innovation director for Amadeus, explained that even in these troubled times there are important trends which are driving new and exciting developments. Many of these, he said, are just around the corner.

"We took the view that during the recession our customers be they travel agents, airlines or hotels, are demanding a lot from their IT and they expect it to help them better manage their customers, make savings and improve yields, and come out of the recession stronger," Mr Laburthe said.

"Because of that, we're committed to investing, and to keep investing, strongly during the recession, to make sure we come up with the new ideas and products that will serve our customers."

Mr Laburthe outlined trends affecting the facets of the travel chain for which Amadeus caters,  including airlines and airline agents, travel management companies (TMCs) and the e-commerce products they use.

Airlines

The first important trend driving innovation at Amadeus is the airline industry's need for a more advanced IT-based passenger handling system to include a richer variety of information.

This would allow airlines to "handle their passengers in a consistent way throughout their journey" and not just as "numbers and figures", Mr Laburthe said.

Further to this are new e-commerce opportunities increasing the number of services available through airline agents, such as hotel and car rental booking, normally the realm of traditional travel agents and even TMCs.

Mr Laburthe said the ability to sell such services and show openly what is available could improve an airline's yields and stimulate demand but mainly in the leisure market rather than in business travel.

"We are investing a lot in building a new generation reservation desktop, putting all the functionalities that travel agents have at the finger tips of the airline agents in call centres," he said.

Mr Laburthe said it was already working with some Asian carriers which are keen to take advantage of new avenues of revenue generation through selling car rentals and hotels rooms. Cathay Pacific is one such carrier currently rolling out the techology.

Effectively, Amadeus is working to give airline agents the same booking capabilities as travel agents through its Amadeus Reservation Desktop (ARD), with all bookings going through its global distribution service (GDS) and distribution agreements with content providers.

Mr Laburthe said: "In order to help them do so they need functionalities that typically would be used by travel agents so the products for doing so are rather old in the industry, so we took the decision a year and half ago to engage into building a fully new generation graphical tool for that."

Travel Agencies and TMCs

Amadeus is developing the next generation of travel agent PNRs used to store a client's travel information, conveniently named PNR 2.0.

These enhanced PNRs not only store travel itineraries, but also all contact information and flight data including delays and events leading to re-booking of hotel rooms.

According to Mr Laburthe, such enhanced PNRs will describe, in real time, how a client's journey progresses allowing agents to serve and assist throughout and "even pro-actively".

PNRs are yet another area of new technology blurred with that of mobile devices. A new line of Amadeus products soon to be rolled out will be based on its Check MY Trip service for accessing PNRs across the internet. Mr Laburthe explained that this has now been "ported", in other words the code has been moved across and enhanced on mobile devices.

"I would say for travel agents, we are investing significantly in this PNR 2.0," Mr Laburthe said.

"We are also investing in profile management and are currently working on building a global database of products that can be accessed in a consistent manor, whatever the location and manner of travel."

A global database of PNRs could allow TMCs to store traveller information whether a trip was booked through a self booking tool or by phone to a call centre. Agents in any office then have access to the same information, important when a corporate traveller is moving between company buildings in other countries.

University research

Amadeus is not slow to capitalise on new research coming out of universities, the most prestigious of which being MIT in Massachusetts and its work on the future of pricing methods and revenue management.

Mr Laburthe said such research would enhance fare searching and the way in which airlines price their products.

The University of Zurich (ETH) is working with Amadeus on "hard core" search engines, as Mr Laburthe described it, the result of which will be new e-commerce search options providing greater transparency into airline pricing.

If the technology becomes reality, those booking air travel will be able to see normal pricing options for travel on a certain date alongside prices for travel the day before, or three days before.

While this could be a scary proposition for the airline industry with customers given access to "increasingly rich information", Mr Laburthe argued that it increased pricing flexibility will stimulate the market and provide greater customer retention rates.

Mr Laburthe added: "The airlines understood that more transparency, more choice, more visibility, what to sell when and at what price, induces more sales.

"Now we want to help the airlines do that and go one step beyond, or actually a few steps beyond, by showing products to travellers that are related to more destinations."

The distant future

Advanced reservation options for the airline industry, enhanced PNRs for travel agents and new more powerful e-commerce thanks to university research are all in the pipeline right now with time frames and development targets attached. Social networking is the twinkle in Amadeus' eye it seems.

Mr Laburthe said: "We have seen that social networking is a very important trend. So we're seeing that it came to travel through reviews, mostly of hotels, but we think we can use social computing for helping travellers to share information and to book with their friends. That's quite a hot one for us."

The teenager of today is tomorrow's traveller. Given the amount of time spent on social networking sites these days by millions of people, not just the under 20s, Facebook, Twitter and other such platforms are becoming increasingly important.

Amadeus is acknowledging and gearing up to social networking as a means to disseminate information, both directly through new applications and indirectly when users naturally communicate new ideas with one another.

www.amadeus.net

Andrew Gough