Amadeus offers cloud scalability for airlines

Amadeus has launched a new cloud-based solution in a bid to help airlines cope with the growing volume of online travel searches and transactions.

Amadeus has launched a new cloud-based solution in a bid to help airlines cope with the growing volume of online travel searches and transactions.

A successful pilot of Amadeus Airline Cloud Availability has been developed with Lufthansa and the Google Cloud Platform to help carriers cope with the growth of internet searches for airline tickets.

Airline ‘look-to-book’ ratios – the average number of search requests before a flight booking is made – were previously as low as 10:1 but now can reach 1,000:1.

Christophe Baroux, Google’s head of cloud platform South Europe, Middle East and Africa, said: “Airline companies are facing fluctuating demand which requires the ability to manage a high amount of transactions and strong peaks in traffic.”

Amadeus claims its solution will also apply dynamic revenue management strategies and enhance the user experience.

According to the company, by synchronising airlines’ central systems and the distributed instances of their availability calculation in real time, consumers can search and shop for Lufthansa’s offers more efficiently and receive close to 100% accurate results of the airline’s availability.

The airline does not lose out on sales opportunities because it can respond to the exponentially growing shopping requests while protecting the airline’s own central systems.

Amadeus said the solution can be scaled up on demand to meet the airline and channel needs, offering flexibility and efficiency, claiming it “copes with any search peak”.

Executive vice president of research and development at Amadeus, Herve Couturier, said: “Amadeus is in a unique position to provide this ready-made solution to all airlines, including our Altéa customers, deploying and operating the same software in distributed instances with native data synchronizations.

“Importantly, this fully includes the application of the most advanced origin-and-destination revenue management logic.”

Amadeus said its pilot run with Lufthansa in the second quarter of 2015 led to the airline “easily absorbing a 20 fold increase in transaction volumes”.

Roland Schuetz, senior vice president and chief information officer for information passage at Lufthansa, said: “We are thrilled with the initial results of the pilot, which has allowed us to be better prepared for the future.

Couturier added: “The solution is built to face the new and future challenges of an industry revolutionised by digital shopping.”