The travel industry has always been fast changing and this ability to change and evolve has become crucial in order to meet the ever changing requirements of a new generation of customers who are well informed, savvy financial planners trying to get the best value for their money.

With this in mind, we’ve launched the End Traveller Trends Observatory (ETTO), an internal sharing and exchange platform for research related to the end traveller using a systematic research methodology. The ultimate goal of this initiative is to better understand the evolution of end consumer behaviour and needs, with the ultimate aim of providing value to our customers so they can strengthen their relationships with travellers. Ultimately, this will support innovation, one of our key strategic pillars, helping us to further shape the future of travel.

To that end, we’ll be running a dedicated series of blog posts about the Amadeus ETTO project, where we will be regularly posting and sharing ideas around the behaviours and evolution of the end traveller.

We hope you find this series valuable and informative – and we hope that you will join in on the conversations surrounding this fascinating topic.

Keep an eye on this blog in the coming days for more insights on this topic and let us know what you think about this initiative in the comments section below.

We consider it very important that we as intermediaries offer added value. Accordingly, I consider the development of ancillary services as a next step in adding greater value for our customers.

Since the rise of low-cost airlines, the number of paid services has expanded and there are now charges related to seat reservations and checked luggage. These types of ancillary services are also being implemented by regular carriers as part of their sales and it has been very important for us to find an effective solution to this and we have made great progress with Amadeus.

Now, Amadeus allows us to sell seat reservations, baggage allowances, and other extras via the Amadeus Selling Platform. And not only are additional sales automated, the payment processing is also automated. This has been enormously helpful in making the process efficient and has allowed us to effectively utilise our front-office employees.

We save an enormous amount of time, our customers are more and more satisfied, and we continue to discover new products available from airline companies that are also offered on websites, but that we can reserve via Amadeus. So we are very satisfied and so are our customers. And the ultimate advantage for our customers and employees is that everything is integrated into a single system, making the product attractive and giving us the opportunity to respond quicker to market developments.

When we started reserving ancillary services via Amadeus, we were presented with a new challenge. This involved new products, new entries, informing people and preparing people for sales using Amadeus. After all, they had grown accustomed to doing this via websites. Thankfully, the transition to Amadeus and ancillary services has been a smooth one. This has been mainly thanks to its simplicity and the fact that a limited number of entries are necessary to complete processes.

We are very satisfied with the results and we also received much support. Initially, Amadeus handled the work proactively, but we also received quick reference guides from Amadeus that allowed us to quickly inform our people of these entries. So, in practice this proved to be a very simple process and we are delighted with how it has progressed.

The time saved, the integration between front, mid, and back office, the complete PNRs we receive, the ancillary services reports we can send customers, and those kinds of things, have helped us with our market position and Amadeus, our technology partner, has indeed given us a competitive advantage.

This research really highlighted some of the challenges travel managers face in addition to the opportunities; reducing spend by up to 25% while keeping the indirect costs arising from routine tasks in check. It also presented us with an opportunity to create cost saving enhancements by applying what we learned from the study.

With this information in hand we augmented our Amadeus e-Travel Management self-booking tool with a bevy of key features. It’s now easier to ensure online adoption with the control of bookings directed offline. Discover improvements ranging from the initial flow activation to the default queue, as well as the additional benefits brought in with Amadeus Offers, a unique feature allowing for multi-proposals to be easily created offline by the travel agent and pushed to the travellers for selection directly within the system.

Interested in learning more? Check out this handy feature pictorial, the short teaser video below, this recent report by Hermes, and visit the Amadeus e-Travel Management website. We also want to know what you think of these enhancements – so be sure to leave a comment below, on our Facebook page, or send us a Tweet.

This year’s hotel survey – the largest ever conducted by Amadeus – examined travel agents’ and travellers’ perspectives on the hotel selection and booking process – drawing information from the views of more than 1,000 travel agents across nine countries including Australia, China, India, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand.

Findings from the survey highlighted that travel agents consider a simple booking process one of the most important criteria when booking a hotel. Travel agents also prefer hotel booking channels that help maximise revenue and offer the flexibility of real-time access to rates ensuring the most seamless booking experience.

Today’s travel agent needs to respond to changing consumer preferences by providing a one-stop service to travellers, particularly given the rising demand for ancillary options when travellers book their hotels. This translates to providing travellers with rich information beyond the traditional rate and availability, assisting travellers in making an informed choice best suited to their needs.

Our study also provided intriguing insight into how cross-selling add-on services are key to ensuring travel agents attract and retain customers who are pre-booking hotel rooms. Airport transfers and sightseeing tours represent the biggest cross-selling opportunities, with travel agents increasingly offering to help travellers rent cars, purchase concert tickets, make dinner reservations, and even buy metro passes. Nowadays, travel agents need to do more than book a bed for the night, by assisting with the booking of other elements of a trip.

Additionally, the survey revealed that hotel reviews by travellers have overtaken brand power. In comparison to 2010, these findings show a marked decrease in pure brand influence which has been overtaken by user reviews with 70% of travellers checking reviews prior to choosing a hotel. With increased use of social media and other online travel resources, travellers are armed with a great deal more information that before, hence the decline in brand power.

Overall, travel agents have also experienced a gradual decrease in the degree of influence that they have on a traveller’s final choice of hotel, with only one in three (32%) travel agents responding that customers heed their hotel recommendations without question, compared to one in two (51%) from 2010.

So what is Amadeus doing to cater to the needs of travel agents in Asia Pacific? Well, we’ve just launched Amadeus Hotels Plus (Multisource), a one-stop-shop search platform integrating Amadeus’ GDS hotel properties with content from leading hotel aggregators to allow Amadeus travel agents to search and book hotel content from multiple sources in a single screen. This allows travel agents to offer a wider variety of options to their customers.

Currently, Amadeus Hotels Plus (Multisource) is available in India, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and will be introduced in other Asia Pacific markets in the coming months.

We emerged as the leading Non Air Solutions provider for travel agents in the MENA region for the second consecutive year at the 20^th Arabian Travel Market (ATM) that ran from 6 -9 May in Dubai.

Amadeus’ selection followed the Technology Show panel discussion on ‘Using the GDS to make Big Bucks’. The session saw the three key GDS players presenting their innovative offerings. An audience comprising regional representatives and key stakeholders participated in a poll where Amadeus took the top spot as the region’s Solutions and content provider of choice for the travel industry.

I had the opportunity to deliver a presentation on the company’s portfolio of hotel solutions, including Amadeus Hotel Plus, Amadeus Link Hotel and our regional solution Amadeus Content Store, an innovative solution providing travel agencies in the MENA region with unified access to over 150,000 hotel properties worldwide sourced from the world’s leading hotel aggregators at very attractive rates.

The audience was shown the vast opportunities lying ahead in the non-air content segment, available to travel agencies seeking to adapt to the fast changing environment. by exposing the  breadth, depth and quality hat differentiates the Amadeus offering. I took the opportunity to spell out a key question: Are the region’s travel agencies ready to change to the new business dynamics or will they keeping on working like 10 years ago?

Amadeus is very well positioned to support the travel agency’s needs –we are currently present in the MENA region through 17 local Amadeus Commercial Organisations (ACOs) servicing 21 countries. And we pride ourselves in our ability to cater to the specific needs of every player in the travel industry through delivering relevant content, best-in-class services and innovative solutions.

We continue to work with all our enthusiasm and resources to reciprocate the trust placed on us by the tourism industry.

]]> http://www.amadeus.com/blog/15/05/atm-2013-amadeus-chosen-by-travel-agents-as-preferred-global-distribution-system/feed/ 0 http://www.amadeus.com/blog/14/05/attention-all-travel-managers-save-up-to-23-in-te-costs/ http://www.amadeus.com/blog/14/05/attention-all-travel-managers-save-up-to-23-in-te-costs/#comments Tue, 14 May 2013 07:44:25 +0000 Luc Pannecoeck http://www.amadeus.com/blog/?p=6655 Further to our recent Blog post, we can now bring you the full details of research conducted by the consultancy company Hermes and commissioned by Amadeus. The white paper “Corporate Travel Management in Western Europe: Challenges and Opportunities” looks at current travel management practices and gives concrete recommendations to help optimise travel spend.

It is clear that travel managers face challenges in achieving cost-efficient travel procurement, but it is possible to make important savings in the T&E budget without compromising on business objectives.

It is important to have a defined travel policy in place, which is enforced within the organisation. The report highlights specific strategies which can have an immediate impact on cost containment:

• consolidating business trips to make more efficient use of employee time
• encouraging wide-spread adoption of the corporate online booking tool to better manage and track travel spend

7 out of 10 travel managers plan to reduce spending by 25% but do not have a clear strategy to achieve this. Are you one of them?

Should you be spending time negotiating discounted fares, or encouraging your company’s frequent travellers to use an online booking tool?  Empowering travel managers to take tough decisions to optimise travel spend is key.

We invite you to read the full report or use this infographic to learn more about the recommendations put forward by Hermes Consulting.

In the first of a new series of posts that will explore developments within the global rail industry, we take a look ahead at what the future holds for Europe’s high-speed rail sector.

Rail travel in Europe has experienced a revival over recent years. With increasing numbers of high-speed lines taking passengers direct from city centre to city centre, more travellers are opting to take the train in favour of other modes of transport for a more convenient, stress-free travel experience.

When the journey time is less than four hours, rail is a particularly popular choice as it is often not only the more relaxing, but also the faster, travel choice when you factor in airport transfer and queuing times. Of course that’s not to say that longer journey times can’t work just as well by rail – even for business travellers – as we recently put to the test. Take a look at our findings here.

It is now three years since EU regulations opened up competition on cross-border international rail travel within Europe by allowing rail companies to operate outside their core domestic borders. Yet despite the many benefits rail travel, the vast majority of the European long-distance rail market is still domestic, with cross-border currently accounting for 6% of total long-distance passenger volumes. High-speed travel accounts for 30 per cent of long-distance trips.

The opportunity for rail operators to tap into this market is huge; the industry is changing and several factors are coming together to transform the current picture. Our recent white paper, “The Rail Journey to 2020” estimated that long-distance passenger traffic would increase by 21 per cent from 2011 to reach over 1.36 billion by 2020, as factors including liberalisation, increased competition and the completion of more than 5000 kilometres of high-speed tracks combine to create enormous opportunities for rail operators to grow their long-distance, cross-border business.

The impact will be widespread. As more standards for data exchange, booking and ticketing emerge, rail will become more accessible to the traveller and far easier to book at an international level. We’ll start to see greater collaboration, as well as competition, among rail operators as they look to distribute their content internationally through third parties and deliver an end-to end travel experience across multiple operators.

Just last month we saw Eurostar announce plans to begin operating services into Germany. This will be just the very tip of the iceberg as seamless cross-border travel within Europe becomes a reality.

In Dubai itself, mobile penetration has reached a staggering 233% and enthusiasm for smartphones is evident at every turn.

Little surprise then that one of the dominant technology themes of the show was mobile.

Nasser Batha, Amadeus’ Regional Markets Director for the Middle East and North Africa, says that as the industry accelerates towards online bookings, mobile will quickly start taking a chunk of that. “We estimate that of the €36bn of revenues from travel bookings in this region, about 15% currently come from online but that’s growing, and will reach 22% by 2015.”

By that time, he says, about 10% of that will come from mobile, rising to 25% by 2020.

Many of the pieces of the eco-system to make that happen are already in place. Large screen phones running on high-speed networks are providing a compelling user experience while simple consumer access to applications has been established through iTunes, Android market place and other ecosytems.

The travel technology sector has been playing its part. The Amadeus Mobile Traveller, an integrated mobile app supporting pre-, post- and in-trip was launched at ATM in 2012, allowing agents to put their services directly onto customers’ home screens on iOS, Blackberry, Android and Wap-enabled phones.

Shibu George, Business Solutions Manager for Amadeus MENA, says uptake since had been a little slower than expected but that he believed momentum was growing as key issue such as payment platforms were solved.

“There has been more interest at the show this year. Agents would like help understanding how to market this, but they are keen,” he says.

Charmaine Fernz, editor of Travel Daily Middle East, said that mobile was a focus of many discussions with agents, who needed to adapt their business and needed interactive tools that made bookings easier.

“The industry is changing and the traveler also. It’s going to be very important to be catering for a more experienced traveler,” she said.

The Middle East feels ready to embrace that change.

Although there is plenty of detail available and clearly many moving pieces that contribute to our results, I would like to highlight for you some of the key financial metrics (all figures are on a year-on-year basis, compared to the first quarter of 2012):

• Revenue grew 4.0% to €795.0 million
• EBITDA rose 5.3%^[1] to €323.4 million
• Adjusted profit^[2] increased 5.0% to €176.3 million

As mentioned above, this was backed by both our Distribution and IT Solutions businesses maintaining their records of consistent operational growth (again, all figures are year-on-year):

• In Distribution our global share of travel agency air bookings^[3] expanded 1.6 percentage points to 39.8%. As a result, the number of air travel agency bookings improved by 2.9% to 119.3 million and revenue improved by 2.4%.
• In IT Solutions the number of Passengers Boarded (PB)^[4] processed through Altéa increased by 13.6% to 131.7 million. Together with a healthy performance in all our other transaction-driven revenue lines, this PB growth led total IT Solutions revenue growth to a very good 9.8% in the period.

In addition to growth in the operating results of our business, profit growth was also helped by the lower financial expenses (as we reduce our average cost of debt and partially pay-down our debt outstanding). However, we also had higher D&A expenses and a higher tax rate in the period. The net effect of all the above means that adjusted profit grew by 5.0%.

Our President & CEO, Luis Maroto, commented:

The markets we operate in continue to be highly challenging, but our strong business model and unrivalled product portfolio continue to allow us to make good progress. Our transaction-based business model of recurring revenues has proven to be resilient while our global customer footprint remains a strength.

Growth was driven by both our Distribution and IT Solutions businesses continuing their track record of consistent growth in revenues, which in turn was supported by equally consistent improved group operational performance – whether you measure by absolute figures, market growth or market share. As a result, in the first quarter our EBITDA was 5.3% higher, reaching €323.4 million, and our adjusted profit was up by 5.0%, totaling €176.3 million.

We remain cautiously optimistic about the rest of 2013 and feel well positioned to benefit from the likely macro-economic recovery, which would allow revenue and contribution to grow further across both businesses.

Today’s results follow the news last week that the European Investment Bank (EIB) granted a loan, for the second time in less than one year, worth €150 million to Amadeus to finance research and development (R&D) activities in our Distribution business line between 2013 and 2015.

For those of you interested in finding out more information, you can look at the press release and other documents published today on our Investor Relations website – where you will also find many other documents and facts relevant to the investor community.

Over the coming weeks, ahead of our Shareholder General Meeting (SGM) in June, we will also be publishing our Annual Report for 2012, which will be available for download from our website. This is another important source of information about the company, and particularly our business and financial performance during 2012.

With regards to quarterly financial results such as those published today, our next release is expected in August, when we will be discussing the performance for the first half of 2013.

If you would like to contact us, please do not hesitate to email our Investor Relations team. We’d be pleased to reply to any questions you might have.

^{[1] 2012 EBITDA figures adjusted to exclude extraordinary items related to the IPO, to allow comparability.↩}

^{[2] Excluding after-tax impact of (i) amortisation of PPA and impairment losses, (ii) changes in fair value of derivative instruments and non-operating exchange gains (losses) and (iii) extraordinary items related to the sale of assets and equity investments and the IPO expenses incurred in 2012.↩}

^{[3] Market share figures are based on GDS-processed air bookings and therefore exclude air bookings processed by the single country operators (primarily in China, Japan, South Korea and Russia) and GDS-processed bookings of other types of travel products, such as hotel rooms, car rentals and train tickets.↩}

^{[4] Passengers Boarded (PB): actual passengers boarded onto flights operated by airlines using at least the Amadeus Altéa Reservation and Inventory modules. A PB is the key metric for charging in the Amadeus IT transactional revenue business line.↩}

These revamped websites follow our global rollout plan which last saw Amadeus Italy, Benelux, and Hungary launched.

With an easy to navigate user interface – business managers, opinion leaders, or job seekers – can find what they need without hassle.

For a look at some of the other global websites check out the Amadeus pages which have already been launched in North America, France, and Brazil, the Middle East and beyond, and Amadeus Spain, Scandinavia, Croatia, Greece, and South Africa.

Have you tried out the new websites yet? What do you think?