How Amadeus is helping airlines to soar back into our lives

Amadeus is the centre of this transformation, helping airlines like Air Canada, Lufthansa, and Qantas to improve their digital offering and deliver more traveller-centric experiences.

Image source: Amadeus.

Few companies have borne the weight of COVID-19 more than airlines. Fleets remain grounded, trips are being pushed back, and business travel has effectively stopped. Thankfully, the global vaccination drive is ramping up, and while the industry’s timeline for recovery is still pending, airlines are taking stock of this moment to adapt to the realities of our new digital economy.

Amadeus sits at the centre of this transformation, helping airlines like Air Canada, Lufthansa, and Qantas to improve their digital offering and deliver more traveller-centric experiences.

To paraphrase John Lonergan, vice president of airline digital and data at Amadeus, airlines were among the first companies to automate and offer digital services, along with banks. That made them innovators at the time, but they have since built up layers of legacy processes and siloes that make it difficult to deliver consistent experiences across the channels customers use today.

Airlines around the world are now addressing this issue as they prepare for recovery, with the aim of using a common language across their organisation to deliver a better customer experience through every stage of the booking process. To that end, Amadeus extended its partnership with Adobe in 2020 to help airlines get closer to their audience, better understand their digital journeys, and make it easier to book the journeys they plan to take in real-life.

Delivering first-class experiences

Amadeus’ integration with Adobe Experience Manager makes it easier for airlines to move data freely and safely between their internal teams, which means they can spend less time piecing information together and more time creating the best experiences for their customers.

“Where a customer lives and where they are headed, plus what they plan to do at their destination and any restrictions along the way — all need to be factored in by airlines when communicating with travellers,” adds Julie Hoffmann, Adobe’s global head of industry strategy and marketing, travel. “This adds to the increasing need for speed and agility by automating workflows to scale across teams.”

Amadeus has also integrated Adobe Audience Manager with its Traveller DNA solution, providing airlines with more context about each customer’s needs before they even enter the booking process. Malaysian Airlines is an early adopter of the joint solution, which it uses to gain more accurate insights, segment travellers and reach out to them with personalised offers.

An agile path to recovery

Airlines have always found creative ways to differentiate themselves, especially once travellers are on their planes. Increasingly, however, they understand the need to modernise retailing across the entire customer journey, from the moment a traveller begins their search through to booking and their trip itself.

Today, it is through digital experiences across all these touchpoints that airlines need to find their edge. The COVID-19 pandemic has raised many challenges, but it has also unleased a wave of creativity and inspired these companies to experiment with new services and ways of communicating with their customers.

Both Lonergan and Hoffmann agree agility is the key to the industry bouncing back. “We need to support rapid experimentation to support recovery while rebuilding,” says Hoffmann, “with an open flow of data between teams at the core of this agile approach to innovation.”

Setting ambitions sky-high

Even before COVID-19, the digital economy was growing faster than the physical economy. The pandemic has simply accelerated this trend, inspiring companies across every industry to re-examine their way of working, in addition to their customer offering.

According to Hoffmann, the last best experience sets the tone for what a customer expects moving forward. The innovations made by retailers, banks, gyms and more since March 2020 have raised the bar for what customers expect from every company they interact with. This includes airlines as well.

Lonergan is optimistic, and believes Amadeus’ integration with Adobe is only the first step in a longer and deeper relationship. Amadeus designed its Airline Platform to help airlines simplify processes, accelerate innovation and optimise their operations by circulating data between their teams, and Adobe Experience Manager gives them more data to share, which only increases its value.

This value can extend to every piece of the travel puzzle, from car rentals to hotel bookings. It will give brands across the ecosystem more insight and control, helping them to improve customer relationships throughout the entire journey as they adapt to a new era in travel experiences.

For more details on Amadeus and Adobe’s partnership, read the full story here.

To listen to the full podcast episode, ‘How to drive a better experience in a digital world’ between Julie Hoffmann and John Lonergan, click here.