Amadeus Airline Cloud Availability solves the challenge of ever increasing flight search volumes

Amadeus Airline Cloud Availability increases systems capacity, which allows airlines to cater to the growing search demands of connected travelers. Successful pilot of the solution completed with Lufthansa and Google Cloud Platform.

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Dec 10, 2015, 12:00 ET

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MADRID, Dec. 10, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- The exponential growth of consumer browsing and shopping for airline products across digital channels has led to a massive, and continuously increasing, volume of shopping transactions. Airline 'look-to-book' ratios – the average number of search requests before a flight booking is actually made – were previously as low as 10:1. Today, these can easily run to 1,000:1.

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"Airline companies are facing fluctuating demand which requires the ability to manage a high amount of transactions and strong peaks in traffic," explains Christophe Baroux, Head of Cloud Platform South Europe, Middle East & Africa at Google. Roland Schuetz, Senior Vice President &CIO Information Passage at Lufthansa, adds that "cache-based systems within major shopping engines have certain limitations and they do not accurately reflect our sophisticated revenue management policies."

A unique, cloud-based dynamic availability solution from Amadeus, Amadeus Airline Cloud Availability, will help airlines cope with this huge increase in search and shopping volumes, whilst applying dynamic revenue management strategies and enhancing the user experience.

Amadeus Airline Cloud Availability, which has been successfully piloted by Lufthansa using the Google Cloud Platform infrastructure as a service, enables instances of airline data and revenue management logic to be deployed remotely in the cloud, on all continents to serve local demand.

By synchronizing the airline's central systems and the distributed instances of the airline's 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. At the same time, the airline does not lose out on any sale opportunity by being able to respond to these exponentially growing shopping requests, whilst protecting the airline's own central systems.

The solution can be scaled up on demand to meet the airline and channel needs offering flexibility and efficiency. Combined with highly automated cloud infrastructure, it copes with any search peak, which means airlines do not need to anticipate such peaks several months in advance.

"Amadeus is in a unique position to provide this ready-made solution to all airlines, including our Altea customers, deploying and operating the same software in distributed instances with native data synchronization," explains Herve Couturier, Executive Vice President of Research & Development at Amadeus. "Importantly, this fully includes the application of the most advanced Origin-and-Destination revenue management logic."

Amadeus Airline Cloud Availability was successfully piloted by Lufthansa in the second quarter of 2015, easily absorbing a 20 fold increase in transaction volumes. "We are thrilled with the initial results of the pilot, which has allowed us to be better prepared for the future," says Roland Schuetz. "This solution combines our airline industry expertise along with Amadeus technology leadership to deploy a fully scalable remote instance of our content within the proven Google Cloud Platform. With the continuous proliferation of digital channels, this future-proof innovation has opened a new era in real time merchandizing".

Herve Couturier says that "the new Amadeus Airline Cloud Availability is built to face the new and future challenges of an industry revolutionized by digital shopping. We are excited to have successfully piloted this unique solution with the help of Lufthansa and the Google Cloud Platform offering worldwide deployment and reach." Christophe Baroux adds that "Google Cloud Platform's unique capabilities bring the best performance, flexibility and customer experience and we're very happy to work with Amadeus and Lufthansa on such an innovative project."

Amadeus

Amadeus is a leading provider of advanced technology solutions for the global travel industry. Customer groups include travel providers (e.g. airlines, hotels, rail and ferry operators, etc.), travel sellers (travel agencies and websites), and travel buyers (corporations and travel management companies).

The Amadeus group employs around 13,000 people worldwide, across central sites in Madrid (corporate headquarters), Nice (development) and Erding (operations), as well as 71 local Amadeus Commercial Organizations globally.

The group operates a transaction-based business model. Amadeus is listed on the Spanish Stock Exchange under the symbol "AMS.MC" and is a component of the IBEX 35 index.

To find out more about Amadeus please visit www.amadeus.com, and www.amadeus.com/nablog for more on the travel industry.