A turning point has been reached where more investment is going into developing modern retailing technology as opposed to traditional Passenger Service System, the boss of airline solutions Amadeus said.
Cyril Tetaz, executive vice president of airline solutions at the European GDS and technology giant, told the Altitude25 conference that it has made a commitment to invest in the future.
In 2025, Amadeus will invest more in the development of its Nevio platform than Altea, the widely used PSS, for the first time although, said Tetaz. “In 2025 we are going to be at a turning point.”
Tetaz said Amadeus has to balance supporting old technology systems while developing the next generation and the firm will continue to invest in Altea which will continue to have more product support human resources dedicated to it than Nevio.
“Some features [of Altea] are very mature. But we continue to invest in some features that are at the intersection [of modern retailing] like loyalty, dynamic pricing and network planning, but we’re at the turning point in product investment.”
Amadeus says investment in New Distribution Capability (NDC) will lay the foundations for the shift to full scale distal retailing and dynamic pricing and is allowing airlines to “ dip their toes” into the future of air fare e-commerce.
Elena Avila, executive vice president of travel distribution was asked about the scale of NDC adoption. She said 2024 saw an acceleration of momentum with some airlines hitting 50% adoption levels. “We have more and more airlines getting to that level of adoption.
“From a feature and functionality perspective we keep on delivering. Travel sellers have asked us to focus on post booking servicing, also everything to do with automation, agent productivity and a long list of features.
“We have a lot of the building blocks to really make NDC a success. It’s really here to stay and it’s growing, but we all agree that there’s still some work to be done in order to achieve adoption at scale.“
Two key challenges face the continued roll out of NDC; the complex environment in which airlines are using different data standard interpretations and schemas for NDC and the increase in the burden it is placing on airline systems due the exponential increase in search activity.
Avila said Amadeus will have a solution to the search problem by the end of the year and it is committed to the “NDCfication” of travel selling.
“We are committed to becoming the number one distributor of NDC content in the industry. We take this commitment very seriously. Most important, as committed as we are, we cannot do this alone, this requires genuinely collaborative effort.
“We need everyone to chip in, share your strategies with us to drive standardisation otherwise we are never going to pick this up.”
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