Amadeus

To understand Amadeus, you have to separate the two main business lines, which are usually working hand in hand but have different functions.

• Distribution (GDS): This is the marketplace business. Amadeus has the largest market share of bookings by travel agencies globally, especially in Europe and Asia. When a travel agent in Paris is looking for a flight to Tokyo, they are likely to be using the Amadeus GDS to access the inventory.
• IT Solutions (PSS): This is the software business. Amadeus supplies the Passenger Service System (PSS) that is responsible for the internal operations of the airline. Their flagship product — Amadeus Altea Suite — controls reservations, inventory, and departure control for more than 100 of the world’s leading airlines (including British Airways, Lufthansa, and Singapore Airlines).

Unlike those competitors who were building bespoke systems for each airline, Amadeus revolutionized the industry with the Altea Community Model.

They built a single, massive platform on open systems architecture shared by all client airlines.

• Benefits: If Amadeus has a new feature (e.g., a new way to process baggage fees) for Lufthansa, it can easily be rolled out to Qantas and Air France as they are on the same core code base.
• Interlining: Due to the fact that alliance partners (like Star Alliance) often share the Altea platform, their systems “talk” to each other natively. This allows checking through bags and issuing boarding passes across different carriers to be much smoother than when systems have to translate messages via EDIFACT.

While aviation is in its DNA (founded in 1987 by Air France, Iberia, Lufthansa, and SAS), Amadeus has aggressively diversified:

• Hospitality: With acquisitions (such as TravelClick and Newmarket), Amadeus now has a complete hotel service system (PMS, CRS, and Business Intelligence) to compete with Oracle.
• Payments: They have a huge B2B payments division to deal with the complex settlement of funds between agents and suppliers.