Qantas to Amadeus – what the hell was that???!?

In 2007 Amadeus and Qantas were riding high. A joy filled press release heralded that their relationship would bloom for another ten years. The then CIO John Willett was full of praise saying

"The development of Altéa [Amadeus' airline customer management system], which has become the leading customer management solution for airlines, has been a milestone for the industry and we expect that the next 10 years will help us to innovate further,"

A year later there was a new CIO at Qantas (Jamila Gordon) and the good times continued. The companies announced that the Altéa system was fully implemented. Gordon was filled with the joy and expectation that can only be found in press releases

"Exceptional customer service is a key competitive weapon and you can only deliver this by understanding the needs of individuals which is what the integrated Altéa system provides." She added, "As the operating environment for airlines gets tougher, it is essential that technology is able to both deliver greater operational efficiency as well as support the implementation of policies that build customer loyalty and drive increased revenues."

Remember those words “deliver greater operational efficiency”.

Fast forward to Jan 3 2010 and the Amadeus and Qantas bromance took a blow (though it does not look fatal) when the Amadeus Altéa system appeared to suffer a world wide hour long blue screen of death crash-a-doodle-do. Automated check-in came crashing down. Customers were stuck and airline crews abused. Qantas firstly called it “intermittent” (SMH) . But later an ABC commentator found out that the system had crashed on three separate occasions during the outage period. Delays, angry customers and twitter rant–a-thons ensued.

Unlike the PR love-ins of the previous announcements, Qantas was very happy to very publicly blame the whole thing on Amadeus. Newly appointed Qantas spokesman David Epstein used all of the tact that his former Labour party bosses are famous for by being very polite in his finger pointing but stating clearly and cleanly

"We are seeking assurances this won't happen again,"

(according to a report from the ABC)

The Herald Sun very neatly summed up the response from Amadeus to the blame game “Amadeus could not be reached for comment”. I bet they couldn’t.

Thanks to Aaron Frutman over at Flickr for the phot of Kobe in flight

Martin Colling, the Bow tie, Travel inspiration, lunch and the real Madrid

I was in Madrid for work a few weeks back. It was a classic case of business travel that sounds amazing - "a week of work in Madrid" (especially to my Australian based friends) - but where reality was far from the hype. I was staying at the Eurostars Madrid Tower, a five star hotel in the newish "Cuatro Torres" area of Madrid (pictured here). A new commercial part of the city disconnected from the heart. Imagine an area of Madrid like a Chatswood or junior La Defense or Repulse Bay (depending on your city of reference). You understand what a I mean - a soulless place close to, but not close enough to, a vibrant global capital.

Result was that we spent the entire time in the 30 story hotel or on a bus or in a dining room. There was one moment were I dashed across the multi-lane or mini highway in front of the hotel and found a local bar to have a coffee in. Other than that I could have been anywhere on the planet.

The work was very productive but the non-work highlight was a lunch with Amadeus' Head of Airline Robotics - Martin Colling. As well as working for Amadeus, Martin has an airline industry blog called "the Shearwater Blog" (what is it about Amadeus people and blogging??).

Martin and I had a great lunch together. The sun was shining and after a week of corporate meals we were outside in a local "joint" for a menu del dia. I finally felt like I was in Spain rather than Hotelland. I enjoyed the conversation too. With Martin's day job focused on Airline sales and ancillary revenue our conversation quickly turned to online sales for airlines and following the recent themes on the BOOT to travel discover and inspiration. We talked at length about all of the activities that a customer engages in on and offline before making an booking and after making a booking. The inspiration, research and collaboration before and the additional planning, sharing, reminiscing and repeating that goes on afterwards. Martin has just published a post on his thoughts on this area (with a heavy airline slant) called "Using a Bow Tie to Make Optimal Marketing and Technology Investments". It is the BOOT's recommended read of the week.

thanks to Pulsarin over at flickr for the photo

More on CWT France to move from Amadeus from Sabre

Quick update on recent post on CWT France moving their GDS contract from Amadeus to Sabre. An industry insider from Europe sent me a few info pieces to add to the rumours around this migration. Story is that the migration has been in the works since as early as late 2006 - under the secret project name "Project Score". There have been commercials issues for the delay from then until know but (as is often the case) there are some technology issues. Looks like there was/is some work to be done between Sabre and SNCF that has been problematic. This all conjecture and innuedo but adds to a great story.

Any Amadeus or Sabre officials out there wish to comment?

One year later - a BOOT rumour comes true. Carlson Wagonlit in France (starts) to move from Amadeus to Sabre

The world of GDS is never that fast moving so it is probably no surprise that a GDS rumour that I spread in July 2007 has taken until Oct 2008 to come true. Back then I predicted that Amadeus would lose Carlson Wagonlit in France to Sabre. Well that "Scoop" is now confirmed as true (here is French news story from earlier this month). Of course in saying that the article says that the deal is "still not official" but that "testing is about to start" (my translation) .

This aritcle is about 4 weeks old. Anyone out there have access to something more recent?

Rumour confirmed - Opodo no longer owns Karavel

As predicted by Opodo staff member Mario Gavira (and reported here by me) , Barclays Private Equity has been confirmed as the new owner of Karavel.

UPDATE - Onelinetravelcrunch that first broke the story has been shut down. Kevin May carries more of the story here.

Rumour of the Week - Amadeus/Opodo to sell off Karavel to Barclay's Private Equity

Mario Gavira at onlinetraveltravelcrunch is reporting that Amadeus/Opodo is going to get rid of French tour operator Karavel with Barclays Private Equity the likely buyer. Mario reports the price at around Euro 100, giving Amadeus at raw Euro 40 million profit on its original purchase price. He has heard of a possible formal announcement today at the French trade fair TopResa. There is some good analysis in Mario's post on the business and rationale for the sale. My (possibly over simplified view) is that Opodo needs to focus on the simple online things - selling air, selling hotels (which they have made harder for themselves but abandoning an in-house program), selling car and capturing customers. Karavel is much more offline than on, so makes sense to pass it to someone else.

UPDATE - Onelinetravelcrunch that first broke the story has been shut down. Kevin May carries more of the story here.

A little bit of Amadeus + A little bit of Sabre = Moneydirect

Press releases have been flying all over the place confirming the name and nature of the Amadeus and Sabre Euro announced last month. The version on AsiaTravelTips tells us that the new venture - called Moneydirect - do payment processing and collections. They describe it as

an industry solution for secure, automated payment processing, clearing and reconciliation for the travel and tourism industry

This is not completely a new business. The Australian arm has been in operation since 1991 and claims to already have 6,000 customers, including Australian based offline giant Flight Centre (according to the customer comment section of their website).

I wonder what if anything can be read out of the announcement that it with be the Sabre rep - James Filsinger - that will be CEO with the Amadeus rep - Laurent Chartier - coming in as the COO/number 2. Someone always has to be number one in a company even in a 50:50 JV but this is one with two competitors and one of those competitors is the boss. Could be very interesting to see or maybe I am trying too hard to find a bit of spicy conflict to liven up the story.

UPDATE - Amadeus have given us some more insight the comments section. Sadly no conflict or spice.

Meta-search and GDS: Bezurk and Amadeus do a deal

Asian meta-search company Bezurk.com and European GDS giant Amadeus are officially working together. A deal was announced last week for Bezurk to use the Amadeus web services product known as Meta-Pricer. This does not mean that Bezurk will move to doing its own bookings. Rather the deal is to reduce the toll that Bezurk places on the websites of its airline partners. Here is the press release.

It is an unexpected twist for a meta-search partner to seek out a deal with a GDS so I wrote to Bezurk CEO Martin Symes to get the inside scope. Here is our exchange.

BOOT Asks: Why do you need GDS help?

Martin Symes Answers: Using Amadeus MetaPricer to access airline fares and availability does a few things for us:

1. Improves our supplier proposition – offer airlines a no cost solution
2. Streamlines number of places we need to go to get fares/availability
3. Speeds up response times – gets results to users faster

Most important is the first reason. The airlines we work with have a wide variety of approaches to getting their fares on to their websites. Some connect straight to their host systems from their internet booking engine (IBE). Some have a cache sitting between their host and the IBE. Some use the host of one of the GDS's. Many use a third party IBE which accesses their own host. Each of these arrangements has it's own technical constraints and economics associated with giving 3rd parties access to the data on any sort of scale.

Many carriers that embraced search engine marketing some time ago offer travel search engines access to API's, which typically query a cache populated predominantly by natural search traffic. Unfortunately many carriers don't yet offer these direct API's, although some have plans to do so. In some cases, we have been asked to provide advice on the design of these.

This has meant that screenscraping has been the next best means of us getting access to airline data. Screenscraping works perfectly fine for many airlines which have a system with sufficient capacity, are fast enough, can control and track access, have a layout that doesn't require multiple page requests per query and who aren't getting billed per query by a 3rd party company running their IBE or host for them.

So for reasons both technical and economic, screenscraping is not always a viable means of us getting the data we need. In these situations Amadeus MetaPricer is a good solution because there is no cost to the carriers or extra load placed on their websites because we are querying fares and availability via the Amadeus system. The only thing the carrier needs to do is distribute their fares to our Amadeus Office Id's for each point of sale.

BOOT Asks: Why Amadeus?

Martin Symes Answers: We issued a mini-RFP to all the GDS’s; Amadeus’ response was the most appropriate from a functionality and price perspective. We have also found them to be very responsive to deal with.

BOOT Asks: Who's paying?

Martin Answers: We pay a nominal fee per query; which is more than covered by the revenue we generate from the commercial agreements we have with our airline partners.

BOOT Asks: What about the non-GDS participating airlines like Air Asia, Virgin Blue, Jetstar, Tiger?

Martin Answers: We continue to maintain direct connectivity with non-GDS airlines; many of which are able to provide access to their inventory through API’s or via screenscraping their public websites, where they have given us permission to do so.

BOOT Asks Are non-airline sites (ie hotles) concerned about the number of searches you are doing? If so, what's the plan?

Martin Answers: We work closely with our OTA and hotel partners and have developed unique search methodologies for each partner to minimise any impact. The conversion rates and therefore incremental revenue benefit we drive for our partners far outweighs any search cost issues they may have.

I was going to write that this was the first GDS and meta-search deal but after some investigating found that back in 2001 Amadeus did a deal with Sidestep. Am told by an Amadeus spokesperson that this 2001 is very different to the Meta-Pricer deal with Bezurk. The first difference is that the 2001 deal was a lower level of connectivity (an API vs Web Services) and secondly it was not for the full searching capability that is in this deal - this one includes fares.

Will give them the benefit of the doubt and agree for now that this is a first of its kind. UPDATE - Kevin at Travolution points out in the comments that Kayak and Amadeus entered into the first meta-pricer deal.

It raises some interesting questions about the ability of supplier and OTA sites/systems to support the pounding that meta-search companies threaten to deliver and of the GDS' companies continued efforts to re-invent themselves as technology companies. I get the product reason behind Bezurk's decision here as they need to continue to improve the product delivery to their inventory providers. Is further proof that the meta-search model is still in development and I hope that this deal helps Bezurk continue to grow its product range.

TRAVELtech: The true cost of booking an airline ticket

First of my posts from the conference TRAVELtech. Have been listening to Tim Russell (MD of Amadeus Australia).

Tim made a very good point when looking at the costs of booking an airline ticket online. He presented research indicating that at a dollar charging level the cheapest place to book a flight is usually the airline’s own website where there is normally only a small credit card fee but no booking fee. Call it $0-$15 per booking. In the middle of the cost spectrum there is the online and offline agent where there are fees and charges ranging from $10-$30 per ticket. Finally At the end of the spectrum there is the full service Travel Management Company (TMC – corporate travel agent). These providers can charge upwards of $50-$60 per ticket.

On the crude measure of dollars per ticket, the airline direct site is the cheapest. However, Tim brings in the great point that when assessing the cost of booking we should really also be considering the time cost is searching and completing the transaction. When this is taken into account the cost spectrum is turned on its head. The TMC booking takes the least amount of time – say 15 minutes, the time it tkes to make a phone call to a dedicated agent. Next comes the online agent who can display multiple carriers in one place making searching faster. Finally the airlines direct site takes the longest – more than an hour because of the need to search more than one supplier before taking a booking.

Including these measures it becomes a neck and neck race between the cost of TMCs and online agents with airlines coming third.

If you are booking a leisure flight for the family and have all the time you need then time does not come into account but certainly in the corporate area there is a huge time difference between the different travel booking channels. Goes part of the way to explain the success of Webjet in Australia despite the huge fees they are charging.

Sabre and Amadeus joint venture - then there were two?

Hot on the heals of the imminent approval of the Galileo and Worldspan merger is news of a Sabre and Amadeus joint venture. But don't get too excited this does not mean we are down to two GDS companies as the JV is for non-air product only according to Travelmole. Unclear to me how that will technically work but given the quantity of non-GDS ways for consumers and travel agents to book non-air would be surprised in the competition authorities rejected the deal.

Amadeus about to be smacked by Sabre in France

Here is GDS the rumour of the year - my spies in France tell me that Carlson Wagonlit Travel France is about to dump Amadeus as its GDS and migrate to Sabre. This is big news in the world of GDS client stealing. CWT is worth some 6 million segments a year or more than 15% of the French market. If the rumour proves true (and my sources say it is a done deal) then it will be one of the largest GDS conversations/migrations in European history.

Now apparently while this is a done deal the "i's" are not yet dotted and the "t's" are not yet crossed. With 6 million segments at stake and with Amadeus' ties to European airlines there is a chance of a last minute "dropping of the pants" in Madrid to stop Sabre making this happen.

Anyone else out there in France know any more?

UPDATE - Sabre's own website has picked up my post in their "Sabre In the News" section but with no hint of a denial.

UPDATE 2 - Given the scepticism of some readers I have gone back to my source for confirmation on this rumour. My insider stands by her story. She says the rumour has been doing the rounds within Sabre's European customers for a couple of months. She should know as she works for one.

UPDATE 3 - Spoke this evening (June 5) with a spokesperson from Amadeus. They said

"The rumour is more advanced that than the reality...CWT regularly review their suppliers and partnerships as part of prudent business practice."

This is not a denial of the rumour but is a clear comment that Amadeus believes they are still in the hunt to retain this client and that the sales battle is not over yet.