Oh My Deus, AMADEUS!
As you hear the travel industry talking over and over about the mortal competition between Priceline and Expedia, you may start thinking that the market is forever split between those two. Well, think twice.
Amadeus, historical player of the flight booking systems and more recently playing with non-aerial transportation, is already one of the most important interlocutors of a lot of airlines, and more importantly in this case, of the biggest OTAs.
In 2015, while Priceline reported a revenue of $9.22 billion versus Expedia’s $6.67 billion, Amadeus is indeed still far behind, displaying a nonetheless impressive $4.28 billion. In profit, it’s not a surprise, Priceline leads the game with $2.33 billion, far ahead of an Expedia with lower margins and a year of expensive acquisitions, who announced $764.47 million… while Amadeus, despite making some strong acquisition last year, too, shows off a $821 million in profit!
And while we’re at it, let’s look at these acquisitions… As reported by TNooz, Amadeus biggest spend in 2015 was €63.3 million cash on Hotel Systems Pro, a sales, catering and maintenance software provider and Itesso, a cloud-based property management system, that cost €32.7 million.
With that, Amadeus kicked off his conquest of the hospitality business with a deal with InterContinental Hotels to replace their Guest Reservation System, the operating system used to manage hotels. Amadeus new platform unifies a Central Reservation System (software that centralizes bookings from all locations in one place before integrating it into the PMS), a Property Management System (system that helps owners manage the property by centralizing key-information such as rooms booked, guests information, room payments, rooms needed to be cleaned and sales beyond the room rate like Food & Beverages), a Revenue Management System (software that balance demand and capacity by forecasting prices for the purpose of maximizing the effectiveness of hotels’ resources), Sales & Catering and another few minor features, into a cloud-based platform designed to improve the customer experience.
