At Innsbruck, running on the cloud has helped us to retire many on-site servers and costly fixed network connections in favor of a single (redundant) connection to Amadeus.

One of the immediate benefits was operational flexibility. Between 2014 and 2019, we saw a 16% increase in passenger numbers, so scaling operations quickly to respond to this new demand was a real priority. Before Amadeus ACUS, when we loaded an application for one airline at a check-in desk or boarding gate it meant we couldn’t load any other applications. So effectively those desks could only be used to serve passengers for a single airline. Moving to ACUS has helped us fulfil the potential of common use service points, which can now be used to serve any passenger, no matter which airline they fly with.

Today, our single connection to Amadeus enables us to run the IT systems of all 42 airline partners at any desk while benefiting from access to any airline system. When implementing new airlines, we no longer need to provision a dedicated network line for each new carrier and so it’s a far more straightforward task. Our IT team is now free to focus on more meaningful change projects while Amadeus handles this complexity behind the scenes.

When we switched to the cloud with Amadeus, we hadn’t necessarily factored improved resiliency into the equation. Yet in March 2019, a large-scale server blackout occurred in the Innsbruck area which would have impacted our services, had we not already switched to ACUS. The result would almost certainly have been several days of manual check-in and boarding processes, with boarding passes written out by hand. It’s safe to assume that on-time performance and the passenger experience would have been impacted.

But this scenario didn’t play out in the end. The ACUS setup allowed us to continue operations as normal and we didn’t see any interruption to passenger services. Even if we experience an issue specific to our ACUS service we always have the option to click to an alternative cloud infrastructure so we can continue operations as normal. This is an often overlooked advantage of cloud computing for airports.

We were also one of the very first customers using the Amadeus Baggage Reconciliation System (BRS), which ensures lost or misrouted bags are kept to a minimum, and reaction times for luggage offload have improved remarkably thanks to increased traceability in BRS. We’ve witnessed the development of this system from its infancy to the function-rich community system it is today. Now, when an enhancement is proposed by one airport it is subsequently made available to all users of the system and we’ve both contributed to, and benefitted from, this approach.

For example, in 2018 Amadeus upgraded BRS so it could also reconcile baggage from non-scheduled traffic like charter airlines. At Innsbruck we cater to a significant number of charter flights from markets like the UK, so this feature helps us provide the same safety and service standards to airline customers across the board.

We took a bold decision to move to the cloud in 2014 but I’m pleased we did and personally I think the wider industry is moving quickly in this direction.

Innsbruck Airport