Amadeus revolutionizes online travel with industry first solution making flight search more relevant and simpler for travelers

MADRID, Nov. 13, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Amadeus, a leading technology partner for the global travel industry, is to preview an industry first search solution which revolutionizes the way that flight options are presented to travelers. The patent-pending Amadeus Featured Results solution will be presented at the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit in Arizona.  Vayama, a leading online travel agency uniquely focused on international travel, is the first pilot customer to implement the solution in beta form on its website, including 100 origin and destination combinations, which will be presented at the Amadeus booth throughout the PhoCusWright conference, November 13-15.  Full global market availability for Featured Results is scheduled for early 2013.

Amadeus Featured Results™ platform significantly improves leisure travelers´ online purchasing experience by making travel search simpler and more relevant. Using breakthrough technology, Amadeus has combined both sophisticated flight search technology and travel business intelligence data to deliver to the traveler a more relevant set of search results at the top of the display screen. In fact, Amadeus is processing more data than ever before in order to return the most relevant, cheapest, fastest, sponsored, and most popular bookable travel options in a tenth of a second. Unlike other available search tools, there is no need for travelers to sift through hundreds of recommendations.

"We believe Featured Results is a game-changer for the travel industry. Since starting the company five years ago, we've been wholly focused on providing travelers with one place to find and book the very best international fares. Online flight search, in its current form, is complex, but we see potential for search to be an engine for discovery and inspiration. After all, planning a trip should be fun, not a chore. Working together with Amadeus, we've introduced the Featured Results solution at Vayama.com to help travelers cut through the clutter to find more of exactly what they're looking for," said Ted Jansen, EVP at Travix International and Head of Vayama.

An Amadeus-commissioned study conducted by PhoCusWright in 2011, Empowering Inspiration: The future of travel search, showed that consumers are overwhelmed by the universe of search options. Travelers´ biggest pain points are the perceived difficulty of content aggregation and information overload, coupled with the anxiety of finding the best price which subsequently impacts their buying decisions.

"Amadeus' vision is to place the traveler in the driver's seat and to create the ultimate search, shop, and buy experience.  And our travel industry customers and the travelers they serve remain the main drivers of our priorities, guiding us on how to best complement our portfolio and evolve our technology," said Holger Taubmann, SVP Distribution Amadeus.

The Featured Results™ solution was developed thanks to various important technology components, highlighting the behind the scenes innovation. The solution leverages Amadeus´ Massive Computation Platform™ which allows the computation of huge amounts of data into live caches that secure instant search capabilities, while securing data accuracy. The platform processes, stores, and serves in a neutral manner the data for Featured Results web services. Amadeus´ business intelligence platform stores and analyzes live and historical global search and reservation data, in order to factor in price volatility and itinerary popularity. It also includes Amadeus´ instant search technology to scan live reservations and extract relevant data that can be incorporated into the search calculation and results.

Additionally, the solution´s algorithm blends both price and business intelligence data to showcase the flight options most-often booked from people who searched city pairs for the same date, or, at the request of the travel agent, promotes a specific offer that is popular or relevant to the specific search. It also integrates live registration data to flag search results with ´relevance signals´, such as popularity of a given route, number of active reservations on a specific flight, remaining seats, when the price was last booked, etc.

"As a leading and growing innovator in online travel and travel search, today Amadeus technology powers some of the most important online travel agencies globally. By helping travelers navigate an overwhelming amount of information and decrease their search time, we can help online travel agents increase customer satisfaction and conversion rates.  Amadeus´ strong investment and focus on the online travel segment coupled with our unique travel technology competency will enable us to successfully continue to serve the evolving needs of our customers into the future," said Taubmann.

Amadeus Featured Results™ is part of the Amadeus Search Portfolio™ which includes a range of solutions that cover the trip lifecycle, from inspiration (discovery and learning) tools through to shopping and booking.

Notes to the editors:

Evolution of online travel search tools at Amadeus

Amadeus has a strong track record in the provision of e-commerce systems for the travel industry. Some of the search and shopping milestone solutions are:

2002: Through Amadeus Value Pricer™, a query returned a dozen cheapest recommendations for air travel between two points - for a requested service class (business, economy etc).

2003: Amadeus Master Pricer™ returned some 200 cheapest recommendations for air travel for the requested service class.

2004: Amadeus Flex Pricer™ brought more advanced functionalities of low fare search - calendar displays and fare families. This empowered consumers to search for the lowest fare in a calendar display, for a specific range of dates, or if they chose, to pay a bit more for more privileges or services – within their requested service class.

2009: Amadeus Extreme Search™ delivered the first in a family of solutions that allow consumers to carry out highly intuitive and personalized travel searches online. Amadeus Affinity Shopper™ brought this new concept of powerful searching  to airline websites for the first time.

2010: Enhanced Extreme Search™ tools for online and leisure travel agencies were presented and rolled out to help travelers obtain inspiration for a trip.

About Amadeus

Amadeus is a leading transaction processor and provider of advanced technology solutions for the global travel and tourism industry.Customer groups include travel providers (e.g. airlines, hotels, rail, ferries, etc.), travel sellers (travel agencies and websites), and travel buyers (corporations and individual travelers).The group operates a transaction-based business model and processed more than 947 million billable travel transactions in 2011.

Amadeus has central sites in Madrid (corporate headquarters), Nice (development). and Erding (operations – data processing center) and regional offices in Miami, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, and Dubai. At a market level, Amadeus maintains customer operations through 73 local Amadeus Commercial Organizations covering 195 countries.To find out more about Amadeus please visit www.amadeus.com. To visit the Amadeus Investor Relations center please visit www.investors.amadeus.com.  Amadeus, is a registered trademark of Amadeus IT Group, S.A. in the United States and other markets.. Featured Results™, Extreme Search™, Affinity Shopper™, and others are trademarks owned by Amadeus IT Group, S.A.

About Vayama

Vayama.com is an online travel agency uniquely focused on international travel. Since 2007, the company has been committed to providing travelers with the most comprehensive set of airlines, fares and flights, allowing people to experience popular, well-traveled destinations as well as some of the most remote corners of the world. By working with a vast network of trusted global partners, Vayama taps published and negotiated fares to put the very best international content all in one place. Travelers who visit Vayama.com can browse thousands of hotels and book rooms at the lowest prices available, as well as rent cars all over the world. For more information about Vayama, visit www.vayama.com.

About Travix

Vayama is part of one of the biggest online travel companies Travix International, based in the Netherlands. The company manages an extensive portfolio of travel-focused websites operating under the brand names CheapTickets, BudgetAir, EasyToBook, Vayama, Vliegwinkel and Flugladen. Travix operates its six brands in 17 countries, employs almost 600 staff and has combined sales of US $1.2 Billion. Travix is part of BCD Holdings N.V. www.travix-international.com.  

About BCD Holdings

BCD Holdings N.V. is a market leader in the travel industry. The Dutch,privately owned company was founded in 1975 by John Fentener van Vlissingen and consists of BCD Travel (global corporate travel management), Travix (online travel: CheapTickets, Vliegwinkel, BudgetAir and Vayama), Park 'N Fly (off-airport parking), TRX (travel transaction processing and data integration), Airtrade (consolidating and fulfillment), VakantieXperts (leisure) and Parkmobile International (mobile parking and traffic applications). BCD Holdings employs over 12,000 people and operates in more than 95 countries with total sales, including franchising, of US$ 22.1 billion. For more information, visit www.bcd-nv.com.

SOURCE Amadeus