Amadeus grow global e-Commerce business with key Air France-KLM agreement

A leading technology partner for the global travel industry, Amadeus, last week announced that it has signed a long-term e-Commerce agreement with Air France-KLM, the leading French-Dutch airline group.

Amadeus’ agreement with Air France-KLM, which is effective worldwide, will see the airline group use Amadeus’ shopping technology for a further five years, across both its domestic and international websites.

The renewed partnership will provide Air France-KLM with Amadeus Flex Pricer to power its revenue and award shopping flows, covering both its Air France and KLM networks, for domestic, regional and long-haul flights.

Travellers will benefit from enhanced self-service functionality, enabling them to enjoy the same, consistent shopping experience when searching for Air France-KLM flights, exploring special offers, redeeming frequent flyer miles, or when rebooking alternative travel options.

Air France-KLM e-commerce SVP Martijn van der Zee said: “We have worked with Amadeus Flex Pricer for a long period now and we are very satisfied. This has led to the extension of our close relationship. Amadeus’ e-Commerce solutions support our need to deliver a seamless customer experience for airfrance.com and klm.com over the next five years.”

This partnership highlights the continued expansion of Amadeus’ e-Commerce business around the world, and today Amadeus now powers web and mobile services for more than 100 airlines across merchandising, booking, and servicing.

At the same time, a recent study carried out by Amadeus, investigating averaged online data from the top 50 airlines adopting the Amadeus e-Retail Booking Engine and Amadeus Flex Pricer, has shown that the carriers have enjoyed a yearly increase in online yield and total revenue from 2011 to 2012.

On a consolidated basis, the Amadeus study found: a 7% increase in online yield; over 16% increase in created Passenger Name Records (PNRs), which combined with the above online yield, delivers an increase in online revenues of 24%; a 7% increase in page views per PNR, possibly indicating that travellers are increasingly searching before making a decision.

Amadeus Global e-Commerce and Mobile Head Philippe Der Arslanian said: “Firstly, I would like to place on record how much we are looking forward to continuing our strong historic partnership with Air France-KLM for a further five years. Air France-KLM is an airline group particularly advanced in its approach to e-Commerce, and we are delighted to support the airline continue to evolve and achieve its digital ambitions.”

He continued, “On another note, we are also extremely pleased to see that our solutions support our airline customers’ online strategies and enable some quite remarkable business results more generally, often outperforming industry growth figures. For airlines using our booking engine, this also proves that higher levels of merchandising are possible when managing the ‘complete experience’, from inspiration to payment, even for complex itineraries.”