Icelandair is the latest carrier to implement Amadeus Electronic Ticket Server (ETS) to manage their electronic ticketing activities. The airline, which flies to 20 destinations in Europe and the United States, aims to distribute 50% of its tickets electronically by end 2004.

“Passengers making their bookings on our website are already enjoying the convenience of using e-tickets and we will extend deployment to travel agencies within the year,” said Arni Sigurdsson, Icelandair’s Director Distribution Systems. “Through ETS, we will be able to offer our customers an even quicker and simpler ticketing process while we realise significant savings in the cost of ticket distribution and related system maintenance.”

E-ticketing in Europe still presents a significant area for growth and cost savings in comparison with the wide-spread market penetration in the US. Today, 12 (Aer Lingus, Aero Airlines, All Nippon Airways, Air Nippon, Australian Airlines, British Airways, Deutsche BA, Finnair, Golden Air, Lan Chile, Lan Peru and Qantas Airways.) carriers are already using Amadeus ETS successfully and achieving major savings in their e-ticket system maintenance costs.

Amadeus’ multi-carrier ETS solution eliminates the need for Icelandair to build and maintain its own e-ticketing database. It comprises a central database which hosts all of an airline’s e-ticket records and provides working copies to the carrier’s departure control system for check-in purposes. Internally, ETS also interfaces with the airline’s sales and reservation offices for direct sales, and with its Passenger Revenue Accounting system for flown revenue and final e-ticket status notifications. Externally, it provides links to global distribution systems for travel agency distribution and to partner airlines’ e-ticketing systems, to enable multi-carrier single ticketing (interlining). As such, ETS brings substantial cost savings to any airline.

“We are pleased to extend a long-standing partnership with Icelandair and provide them with a complete, integrated solution to manage their e-ticketing activities,” said Amadeus’ Vice President, Airline Business Group, Hans Jorgensen. “With ETS, Icelandair also has the capacity in the future to realise the full potential of e-ticketing and offer their customers a seamless travel experience by allowing exchange of e-ticket coupons with its partner airlines.”

“ETS is 100% industry compliant; guarantees the carrier free access to all industry-standard upgrades and encourages a community development principle. This enables hosted carriers with common business interests to share funding of mutually beneficial developments at a fraction of the cost which the ‘stand-alone’ e-ticket carrier faces,” he added.

“Our unrelenting enhancement of ETS means we are continuing to develop our e-ticketing infrastructure further and by the end of this year will be able to offer more than 60 interline connections between our ETS hosted carriers and their external partners.”

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