Amadeus to Launch Patent-Pending Search Solution

Amadeus is to preview an industry first search solution which enhances the way that flight options are presented to travellers.

The patent-pending Amadeus Featured Results solution is being presented at the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit in Arizona, U.S.A., 13-15 November.

Vayama, an online travel agency focused on international travel, is the first pilot customer to implement the solution in beta form on its website, including 100 origin and destination combinations.

Full global market availability for Featured Results is scheduled for early 2013.

Using breakthrough technology, Amadeus has combined both sophisticated flight search technology and travel business intelligence data to deliver to the traveller a more relevant set of search results at the top of the display screen.

Ted Jansen, EVP at Travix International and Head of Vayama, said, “We believe Featured Results is a game-changer for the travel industry. Since starting the company five years ago, we’ve been wholly focused on providing travellers with one place to find and book the very best international fares. Online flight search, in its current form, is complex, but we see potential for search to be an engine for discovery and inspiration. After all, planning a trip should be fun, not a chore.”

An Amadeus-commissioned study conducted by PhoCusWright in 2011, Empowering Inspiration: The future of travel search, showed that consumers are overwhelmed by the universe of search options. Travellers’ biggest pain points are the perceived difficulty of content aggregation and information overload, coupled with the anxiety of finding the best price which subsequently impacts their buying decisions.

Holger Taubmann, SVP Distribution Amadeus, said, “Amadeus’ vision is to place the traveller in the driver’s seat and to create the ultimate search, shop and buy experience. And our travel industry customers and the travellers they serve remain the main drivers of our priorities, guiding us on how to best complement our portfolio and evolve our technology.”

The Featured Results solution was developed thanks to various important technology components, highlighting the behind the scenes innovation. The solution leverages Amadeus’ Massive Computation Platform which allows the computation of huge amounts of data into live caches that secure instant search capabilities, whilst securing data accuracy. The platform processes, stores and serves in a neutral manner the data for Featured Results web services. Amadeus’ business intelligence platform stores and analyses live and historical global search and reservation data, in order to factor in price volatility and itinerary popularity. It also includes Amadeus’ instant search technology to scan live reservations and extract relevant data that can be incorporated into the search calculation and results.

Additionally, the solution’s algorithm blends both price and business intelligence data to showcase the flight options most- often booked from people who searched city pairs for the same date, or, at the request of the travel agent, promotes specific offer that is popular or relevant to the specific search.

It also integrates live registration data to flag search results with relevance signals, such as popularity of a given route, number of active reservations on a specific flight, remaining seats, when the price was last booked, etc.

“As a leading and growing innovator in online travel and travel search, today Amadeus technology powers some of the most important online travel agencies globally. By helping travellers navigate an overwhelming amount of information and decrease their search time, we can help online travel agents increase customer satisfaction and conversion rates. Amadeus’ strong investment and focus on the online travel segment coupled with our unique travel technology competency will enable us to successfully continue to serve the evolving needs of our customers into the future,” Taubmann added.

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