The pace of technological change in air travel did not slow during the Covid-19 shutdown, according to the head of Amadeus’s airline operations platform Altéa.
Speaking at the global distribution system’s Altitude 22 conference in Dubai, Altéa executive vice-president Cyril Tetaz urged airline executives to embrace the long-term technology changes taking place in the industry.
He told them: “We need to acknowledge we are facing some challenges. There has been tension at airports. Restarting has been tough. [But] the expectation from us is to come up with robust operations.”
Tetaz said technology development had not been “frozen” during the pandemic, with strengthening core technology a priority for Amadeus. He insisted: “There was as much work during the pandemic as there was before.”
He said existing technologies such as revenue optimisation and order management had been a focus during the Covid era and Amadeus had rolled out dynamic pricing technologies with a number of airline partners, while the development of New Distribution Capability (NDC) and the shift away from legacy distribution systems had continued.
The goal was to become “customer-centric and not order-centric”, he said.
Ultimately the aviation sector needs to provide the sort of online experience that platforms such as Netflix offer, Tetaz argued.
He said Amadeus’s partnership with Microsoft to move its systems to the cloud would facilitate this and enable more modern retailing and automation.
Gulf carrier Etihad is set to renew its partnership with Amadeus from March next year and expects to see advances to the Altéa airline platform which would benefit the whole sector.
Etihad chief digital officer Frank Meyer noted the carrier has “high expectations” of the Altéa platform and said: “We will bring a lot more capability to the platform in association with Amadeus, which hopefully other Altea customers will benefit from.”