Though widely known to airline industry insiders, you might find this point raised by a blog reader regarding our Global airline traffic trends report interesting.

We found that the average connecting rate of the ten busiest airports in Asia is 19% compared with 32% for the top ten hubs in Europe. Our data agrees with the notion that Asia is a much more point-to-point market than Europe. And in North America the hub and spoke model is even more prevalent: the average connecting rate for the top ten hubs in North America is 45% way ahead of both Europe and Asia.

We are delighted to welcome you to our Airline Solution Showcase at the Ritz-Carlton Dubai International Financial Centre Hotel from 29 – 30 May.

This dynamic showcase will feature a range of topics including insights on how to maximise your revenue, Airline Ancillary Services, and EMD among many others. We’ve designed this showcase to inform and teach, and also to be a forum for discussion and networking.

During these two days you will have the opportunity to get to know our products with firsthand insights from Amadeus employees. Talk to the product experts, see the demonstrations and have all your questions answered.

The deadline to register is 21 May, so don’t hesitate and secure your spot to this insightful showcase now.

This event is specifically for our airline customers and is focused on Distribution (GDS) topics. If you are a travel agency in the region please contact your local account manager for travel agency events.

We’ve all seen retro photos from the late 1960’s during the golden age of air travel when smoke filled cabins were common place. Eventually, as business travellers became more conscious about their wellbeing, smoking was banned on all flights and a new era of healthy travel was ushered in.

Accordingly, employers are putting a greater emphasis on an individual’s ability to “adapt and self-manage” their health by taking better care of themselves.

Our research supports this trend and found that 77% of travellers believe that looking after their health while travelling is entirely their own responsibility, while this attitude is more marked among the health-conscious 50+,  of which 82% agree.

As technology matures, a range of tools will help travellers manage their health, including a suite of mobile-device-based monitoring and diagnostic applications known as mHealth. There are already many applications available that could allow for remote diagnosis of an illness when in an unfamiliar country, monitor heart rates or blood pressure, and help with sleep management.

We believe this trend is likely to accelerate over the next decade as debt-laden governments in the West do their best to defray the cost of total healthcare expenditure.

Apart from mobile technology, with more sophisticated and smaller sensors that can be woven into our clothes or implanted into our bodies, integrated with social networks that bring together patients’ groups and healthcare providers in a more responsive way, the potential to track, share and manage your “wellbeing status” will be huge.

However, for stress or anxiety in transit, the answer may not be conventional mHealth applications. Our research indicates that while transit-induced anxiety and stress is undoubtedly an issue for many, travellers are skeptical about the ability of mHealth applications to address their fundamental problems (and therefore also less willing to pay for them).

Does mHealth technology appeal to you?

Your plane lands after a six hour flight to the Caribbean. Finally, after all of the hectic months of work in the frigidly cold city – your tropical dream holiday has arrived. You’ve packed everything needed for a relaxing vacation and now all you have to do is pick up your baggage and head to the beach front resort.

Patiently waiting in front of the baggage carousel watching as one holidaymaker after another collects their baggage – you notice that the crowd is growing thinner and thinner by the minute. Twenty minutes pass, then thirty. Eventually, an hour later, a stark realization casts a dark cloud over your holiday.

Your baggage has been lost. Anger, frustration, and hopelessness set in – your dream holiday is at risk of being ruined before you’ve even had your first beach side piña colada.

The fictional story above is a reality for many airline customers.

According to SITA’s 7th Annual Baggage Report, despite a significant improvement in the mishandling rate over the last four years, 29.4 million bags were delayed on arrival in 2010 which translates into a cost of $2.94 billion for airlines.

A recent study from Amadeus, Navigating the Airport of Tomorrow, included a survey conducted by JD Power, which found that over 34% of passengers had experienced baggage issues on their most recent flight. The survey also found that 37% of travellers said they would like to use their mobile to receive real-time baggage arrival updates.

Fortunately, travel technology of the future is already making mishandled baggage a frustration of the past.

We’ve recently teamed up with SITA, the world’s leading specialist in air transport communications and IT solutions, to create Altéa Baggage Tracking which will initially cover 54 airports worldwide.

Altéa Baggage Tracking provides real-time tracking information and status updates regarding the location of baggage through multiple channels worldwide, whilst reducing the costs associated with mishandled baggage in a single, integrated environment.

Lost and mishandled baggage has spawned reality shows, ruined vacations, and cost the airline industry billions – but soon it will be a thing of the past.

Check out this BBC video report for more insight into how we’re working to create a better travel experience.

Amadeus flexed its innovation muscles during Arabian Travel Market (ATM) 2012, held in Dubai (30 April-3 May). You may know that we launched our regional mobility solution, Amadeus Mobile Traveller, a real milestone in the mobility landscape in this part of the world.

During these days, Amadeus further demonstrated its leadership by showcasing a number of productivity optimisation solutions at ATM. These included Amadeus Air Preferences, a powerful solution that enables travel agents to respond instantly to market change and strengthen premium partnership agreements, Amadeus e-Travel Management, an online self-booking tool currently being used by over 5,000 corporations worldwide and Amadeus Content Store, an innovative solution to provide travel agencies in the MENA region with cohesive access to over 150,000 hotel properties worldwide sourced from the region’s leading hotel aggregators at very attractive rates.

We also participated in a panel on “How to fully utilise GDS non-air content”. This event had Amadeus, Travelport, and Emquest (Sabre) speakers explain their respective answer on this subject. I had the honour to set out our value proposition in that forum. I had the help of a clown who was juggling next to my podium with balls of different colours (the most effective being clearly the Amadeus blue one) to illustrate the difficulty agents find in using GDS tools. Our message to travel agents in the audience was based on the Amadeus Content Store, a tool offering rich content in an extremely user-friendly platform.

The agents greatly enjoyed our way of presenting their daily obstacles and welcomed our offering to help them in their job. A poll, following the panel speeches, asked the agents about their preferred Global Distribution System.  And you know what – Amadeus was the chosen one, giving us further motivation to redouble our efforts to support this region’s travel sector with best-in-class technology and solutions.

Today we have published our financial results for the first quarter of 2012 (January 1 to  March 31).

Comparing these results with the first quarter of 2011, highlights include:

• Revenue grew 8.5% to €764.1 million
• EBITDA^[1] rose 5.4% to €307.2 million
• Adjusted profit^[2] increased 22.1% to €167.9 million
• Net debt reduced further to 1.65x last twelve months’ EBITDA

The Distribution and IT Solutions businesses played equally important roles in the company’s performance during the quarter: revenue in the Distribution business increased by 8.0%, with total bookings, including both air travel agency and non air bookings, up 6.1% to 132.3 million during the quarter. Amadeus also expanded its global market share of travel agency air bookings by 0.9 of a percentage point, maintaining our leadership position with 38.2% market share. In the IT Solutions business revenue increased by 10.4% with the number of Passengers Boarded (PB)^[3] up 23.3 to 115.9 million PB in the quarter. Looking ahead a couple of years, we currently calculate that we will have over 750 million^[4] PB for 2014, based on existing contracts.

Luis Maroto, our President & CEO, commented on the results:

“Following on from our strong outcome in 2011, the results from the first quarter of this year continue to be very encouraging.

“Such consistent growth in revenues as well as new clients is a direct result of our long-term commitment to developing innovative customer-focused solutions and consolidating our global presence. This strategy was again proven successful by two milestone contracts recently signed, the Altéa contract with Southwest Airlines and the Expedia contract for content and technology in North America.  Although both deals were announced during the second quarter, they deserve special mention for their great significance in such a key market – and their long-term potential fills us with great enthusiasm.

 “Despite the uncertain economic environment, we look forward to the remainder of the year with confidence.”

As usual, our financial results were filed with the CNMV (the Spanish stock market regulator) and the information is made available in both Spanish and English.

If you would like to know more about our financial performance, you can find further information in the press release  we issued this morning, which can be found in our Investor Relations centre.

Our half year results will be published in August – we will update you again then.

For the 11^th consecutive time Amadeus has had the opportunity of being heard by this region’s airline and travel agency community at the Arabian Travel Market event. We are perceived as an innovative trend-setting company committed to providing distribution and IT solutions to this growing sector in the Middle East.

With regional headquarters in Dubai, we are present in the MENA territories through 17 local Amadeus Commercial Organisations servicing 21 countries and we continue to innovate as a key technology partner for the travel industry.

Arabian Travel Market (ATM) 2012, which ran from 30 April to 3 May at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre (UAE), also saw the launch of Amadeus Mobile Traveller, a fully integrated and complete mobile application designed to support pre-trip, in-trip and post-trip functionalities. Developed specifically for the MENA region in Arabic, English and French, this unique application provides travellers with access to a range of real time information and enables travel agents to increase customer loyalty, streamline operational costs and maximise revenues.

Today, we’re announcing our second analysis of global airline traffic trends. The study details the passenger growth between regions and reveals that Asia is leading worldwide growth moving more travellers than ever around the world. It also showed us that 8 out of the 10 top inter-city routes are in Asia-Pacific. None of them are in Europe or North America! You can see the growth patterns in the Global airline traffic trends infographic above.

Travel is closely linked with the economic performance – but also politicial environment – of a region, so some of the findings of the study are not a surprise if you follow the news. Yet, in the analysis, we also highlight other markets that might not have crossed your mind but still display important growth like Chile (21% growth).

This macro-level understanding of worldwide passenger flows is built on the analysis of thousands of O&Ds (Origin and Destination routes). This powerful research is done with the Amadeus Total Demand tool, launched two years ago in partnership with airconomy, a strategy consultancy for aviation networks. The tool has enabled us to look into:

• Connecting traffic share versus point-to-point traffic
• Fastest growing and shrinking travel markets
• The world’s busiest inter-city routes

Amadeus Total Demand takes into account passenger flows between a given origin and final destination airport (O&D data), irrespective of the number of connecting stops. This means it can measure true traveller trends. What is great with Total Demand is that we can look at the big picture but also zoom down to the level of a single O&D and analyse, for instance, how many people fly direct or use a connection. We can also see the split between Economy and Premium cabins.

For instance, traffic between Europe and the Middle East grew by 3% year on year, with more than 35 million passengers. The #1 O&D in that region – London to Dubai posted 24% growth, while at the same time the 2^nd largest (London – Tel Aviv) remained flat in passenger terms.

A few things have changed since we launched our first global traffic trends analysis. Firstly, we have changed the approach of the analysis. The first time we looked at Q1 data over a period of two years. This time we analyse traveller data over a full year – 2011 compared to 2010 – which reduces seasonality differences from one region to another.

The second change is that Amadeus acquired airconomy earlier in the year. The airconomy team is based at Frankfurt airport; it is a small team which, despite of its size, brings a huge amount of knowledge to the Amadeus travel intelligence business.  The team is now fully integrated within Amadeus and acts as an incubator for other travel intelligence products. We’ll keep you posted on the traffic analysis we will produce on a regular basis as well as on the new prototypes we will develop with airconomy, to try to bring a different perspective to the travel industry.

A recent post introducing IdeaWorks’ latest report on A la Carte shopping is a fresh contribution to the ongoing discussion of a topic that is highly relevant in today’s turbulent airline industry.

Many airlines are adopting low-cost carriers’ unbundling strategies, while many others maintain a strategy of keeping a bundled product offering. Regardless of their strategic choice, Amadeus supports airlines’ different commercial strategies by providing the best and most cost effective technology to sell their products and services, including ancillary services, in a meaningful and competitive manner. We do it today, and we will continue to develop the state-of-the-art for the travel industry in the future.

In the North American market this was recently confirmed by Southwest Airlines’ choice of the Amadeus Altéa Suite for its international flights and Expedia’s choice of Amadeus for a multi-year content and technology deal.

So the debate is not about technology, as some may claim. The debate is about consumer choice and fair competition between airlines.

For some airlines, fees for services that are foreseeable (check-in, baggage, seat selection, to name but a few) are not clearly visible. The loss of price transparency that this implies is making it increasingly difficult for travel buyers and consumers to compare offers in the market, perhaps especially the not-so-savvy traveller. This is not good for consumers. In many cases this practice is making consumers take misguided decisions, since the advertised price of the airline is not a fair reflection of the final price to be paid for the trip, and the final price may be higher than the “bundled” offer of the competitor. This is not good for competition.

Amadeus is a strong supporter of consumer choice and fair competition. We believe there is a need for updating consumer protection legislation to clarify what airlines (and other travel providers) are required to disclose about their product, in the channel through which they choose to distribute their services. This is why we support Open Allies in the US, and why we welcome the recent initiatives from the European Parliament to strengthen regulations on price transparency.

At a minimum, we believe that consumers should be provided with transparent information that include the cost and availability of core services, and be able to act on these during the purchase process. If and when these services appear on the menu, then “A la Carte Shopping” makes a lot of sense.

They say that April showers bring May flowers, and in April we had a deluge of posts, so you may have missed some.  See below our top posts from last month. Would you like to receive our top posts by email every month? Sign up now at the bottom of the column on the right, under “Get the latest updates.”

Amadeus shares the same concerns as Expedia about Google

What is technology without ‘pizazz’?
Posted by David Brett (President, Amadeus Asia Pacific)

We are delighted to welcome Southwest Airlines to the Altéa community!
Posted by Julia Sattel (Senior Vice President, Airline IT, Amadeus IT Group)

Our culture: the key ingredient to our success [video]
Posted by Huibert-Jan Evekink (Director, Employee and Brand Engagement, Amadeus IT Group)

Digital breadcrumbs: the impact of mobile payments
Posted by Daniel Batchelor (Global Communications Manager, Amadeus IT Group)

Why Arabian Travel Market is important to Amadeus
Posted by Antoine Medawar (Vice President, Middle East & North Africa, Amadeus IT Group)

Shocking News: A la Carte Shopping is Good for Consumers
Posted by Jay Sorensen (President, IdeaWorksCompany.com LLC)