Amadeus and Adobe unveil strategic alliance to superpower airline retailing

Amadeus and Adobe unveil strategic alliance to superpower airline retailing

Amadeus and Adobe have announced a strategic alliance to bring up to date retailing and personalisation capabilities to airlines selling direct to customers. The deal was unveiled yesterday at European travel technology giant Amadeus’s global Airline Executive Summit in Prague. … Continue reading

Amadeus and Adobe have announced a strategic alliance to bring up to date retailing and personalisation capabilities to airlines selling direct to customers.

The deal was unveiled yesterday at European travel technology giant Amadeus’s global Airline Executive Summit in Prague.

It follows a similar deal with management consult and professional services provider Accenture announced last year.

This saw a merchandising intelligence platform built within a year using Accenture’s data analytics that has been shown to improve airline ancillary sales by as much as 15%.

The partners said the combination will enable airlines to deliver “amazing digital experiences to travellers across any device and throughout the entire journey”.

John Lonergan, Amadeus director digital, airlines, said combining Adobe Experience Cloud with Amadeus’s Customer Experience and Dynamic Intelligence platforms means the sky will be the limit for what airlines can do.

He said so many of Amadeus’s current airline partner currently already use Adobe that its clients basically made the choice of who to partner with it.

“They [Adobe] have incredible horizontal reach across all industries, across retail, web publishing, creating incredible digital experiences in banking, health, and automotive. They are just massive.

“At Amadeus we have deep knowledge of the travel industry. We have the content, can create booking engines but it’s an incredibly specialised field.

“Adobe are light years ahead of anyone else in the space in digital marketing and being able to work with advertisers.”

Lonergan said the deal with Adobe is not exclusive and Amadeus will continue to work with other marketing technology experts, but that the choice to team up was an obvious one given the number of shared customers.

“Our consumers were asking us how does our product work with Adobe, so this really was driven by customer demand.

“The other things with both these systems is that they are extremely powerful, extremely configurable.”

Amadeus says it has already identified nine opportunities to work on with Adobe and it is currently evaluating these with clients to work out which is addresses first.

Lonergan said the formal alliance means Adobe and Amadeus will work together to create a seamless partnership in which each side knows where the boundaries are.

“We need access to their developers and they need access to ours. A formal agreement gives a commitment to say we are in this properly. We will make these systems the logical choice for our clients.

Julie Hoffmann, head of industry strategy and marketing – Travel at Adobe said: “Our goal in Travel is to create and deliver to all touchpoints emotionally engaging experiences that transform and inspire.

“The world’s leading travel and hospitality brands rely on Adobe Experience Cloud, and this partnership with Amadeus will enable us to integrate further with airline brands and take that experience to the next level.

“Together, we’ll create lifetime value for travel brands, while leveraging a new form of intimacy on mobile from the anonymous to the known traveller. Shared airline customers will deliver on digital intimacy across the entire journey.”