Amadeus, a leading travel technology partner and transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry, today announced record performance of its airline IT business and strategy highlights for 2010.

Amadeus’ airline IT division has seen a strong uptake of its flagship solution, the Altéa Suite, which enables airlines to seamlessly manage their customers from their shopping experience to check-in. Over the course of 2009, Amadeus’ data centre processed 238 million passengers boarded from airlines using Altéa, 23% more than in the previous year. This represents 11% of the world’s air traffic[1].

Since January 2009, Amadeus has migrated 31 airlines to one or more Altéa CMS modules and contracted 30 further airlines. In the last few months, Aegean Airlines and TAM became fully operational on Altéa CMS in time record migrations. Spanair migrated its departure control system to the Star Alliance Common IT Platform and thus completed adoption of the joint centralised platform developed and hosted by Amadeus for participating Star Alliance members.

Amadeus’ migrations are gathering pace with 77% of its Altéa customer base already using the Altéa Reservations and Inventory modules. Some 22 airlines have already cut-over to the last module of the Suite, the Altéa Departure Control System (DCS), launched in 2007. Migrations to DCS will continue to be an important focus throughout 2010 with more than 20 projects in the pipeline.

“In this challenging operating environment we have seen airlines invest more than ever in technology that contributes to cost savings, customer benefits and revenue enhancements”, said Julia Sattel, VP Airline IT, Amadeus. “Further, we have set up a dedicated IT consultancy team to ensure our airline customers are exploiting the full power of the technology we provide them with”, she added.

The Airline Global Services group which builds on Amadeus’ 20 year experience providing IT services to airlines, has to date undertaken consultancy and system integration projects with over 50 airlines, including Finnair and Icelandair in 2009.

Amadeus has continued to focus on innovation and further develop its airport IT business. Beyond the departure control systems in place, Amadeus has invested in complementary solutions to improve airport IT and provide more integrated airport services. Nice Côte d’Azur Airport, Air France, Amadeus and IER partnered to pilot a new mobile boarding pass based on Near Field Communication (NFC) technology.

Amadeus e-commerce also continued to be an area of expansion. In 2009 Amadeus launched Affinity Shopper, an extreme search solution for airlines websites, for which the company was awarded the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit Award. Through this solution consumers can explore and select their trip based on their desired holiday experience, allowing them to ask online open questions such as “where can I go, what can I do, for what I want to spend?”. Amadeus e-commerce solutions generated approximately €10 billion of revenue for airlines during 2009.

“During 2010 Amadeus will continue to focus on delivering solutions and innovation in areas such as revenue management, e-commerce and ancillary sales”, commented Julia Sattel. “Ancillary sales have become imperative across the airline industry as evidence has shown there is significant potential to improve profit through the up-selling and cross-selling of these products and services. Amadeus already enables the sale of ancillary services through airline websites, and is currently working to support all sales channels during the coming months, she added.