Amadeus unveils foundation for hotel industry’s biggest technology transformation in 20 years

·         New technology platform prepares hotel industry for new era in search, reservation and distribution

·         All hotel GDS operations now run Linux open systems technology

Madrid, Spain, 26 November 2007: Amadeus, a global leader in technology and distribution solutions for the travel and tourism industry, has completed the migration of 75,000 hotel properties onto a next-generation distribution technology platform that prepares the hotel industry for a new era in electronic distribution, reservation and search. The platform, based on open systems technology, is the foundation for much more flexible hotel distribution and a major milestone in Amadeus’ strategic goal to re-engineer hotel technology. This is the largest technology project currently being undertaken for the hotel industry. 

Today, Amadeus has re-engineered the GDS distribution application based on the Linux operating system which offers full, multilingual hotel descriptions and uses OpenTravel Alliance XML[1] standards to enable more sophisticated interactions with other systems. This is the first of three milestones in the roll-out of Amadeus’ next generation Hotel Distribution Platform. A content management platform and a next generation reservation platform will follow. Hotels will be able to centralise multi-channel distribution, reservation and content management on one platform. With integrated PMS reservation functions, the platform will offer hotels a single image of the chain’s inventory of available rooms.

Amadeus’ re-engineered hotel technology platform paves the way for a new era in hotel search, both online and offline. Legacy systems are limited in the number of search criteria. Amadeus’ new platform will enable travellers and agents to search for “hotels in southern France with a swimming pool”. It also makes the integration of user-generated content much easier – so a travel agent will be able to respond to a customer’s request to find the “highest rated hotel for families in Thailand”. As more and more independent hotels are brought into the Amadeus system, such flexible search will be invaluable in matching customers with their ideal choice of hotel; opening up the “Long Tail” of hotel content[2] and driving bookings, revenue and yield for hotels which are distributed through Amadeus.

The new platform will also help hotels cope with high look-to-book ratios as the travel industry continues its inexorable shift to online booking. Since 1996 the number of transactions processed by Amadeus per booking has increased by 500%. Currently, hotels receive about 20% of their bookings from the internet; as that proportion rises, the number of transactions a hotel’s technology system must process will increase exponentially. Hotels using Amadeus’ advanced new platform will be able to control their costs as transactions rise exponentially.

 “With more than two billion people checking-in to hotels each year – more even than the airline industry – the hotel industry is one of the world’s biggest in terms of transactions processed, but the industry’s IT processes remain fragmented and unready to cope with the enormous increase in transactions as more hotels are booked online,” says Antoine Medawar, Managing Director, Hospitality Business Unit, Amadeus, “Our hotel distribution platform is designed from the ground up to help hotels reduce costs and increase revenue by centralising their technology infrastructure and preparing their businesses for the next wave in the online evolution of the travel industry.”

Today’s announcement is also a major milestone in Amadeus’ strategic drive to transition its entire data centre operations to open systems. It is the largest IT project to deliver new technology which will be available to the whole industry, and the third-largest IT project Amadeus has ever undertaken.