AMADEUS UK is launching a raft of new products for business-travel agents as part of its plans to increase its overall share of the UK market.
The global distribution system supplier is currently piloting its Plus Zoom reporting tool, which can collate an agent’s best-selling products to help improve commission deals, with a number of business travel agents.
A Plus Zoom add-on, called World Zoom, is also due for release. The product allows corporate clients to view their travel arrangements directly through a business agent.
The UK arm of the GDS supplier said it currently transacts 8% of bookings in Britain and is fourth in the league table behind Galileo at 58%, Sabre at 20% and Worldspan at 13%.
Globally, Amadeus is the market leader in bookings made and has around a 30% share, having just overtaken Sabre.
Amadeus UK managing director Graham Nichols said: “We want our UKmarket share to be about 20% within the next couple of years and we want to move into the business sector. Our share is quite small in that area, it’s only about 10% but we would like to see that rise so that our leisure and business ratio is 50:50.
“We were not fully concentrating on markets where we could grow because when you are sitting on main market share globally, you concentrate on that. But we started looking at potential growth markets and realised there were huge opportunities for us here,” Nichols said.
Amadeus UK recently signed a deal with Travel 2/4 which was attracted by low-fare finder Value Pricer. ProWeb, an Internet version of the Amadeus GDS system, will be released next month while version five of 1a Res, which makes agents’ own Web sites bookable will also be released soon.
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