The big move
The first Scandinavian travel agencies started in April to use the Amadeus platform for the Central Ticketing System, known as CTS. The platform simplifies the handling of tickets for travel agencies, and is used throughout the world. So far, more than half of Amadeus’ Scandinavian customers have changed to the system. Amadeus Magazine has met two of them.
All Scandinavian travel agencies who are customers of Amadeus shall have moved over to CTS by the end of the year. Travel agencies previously used the TICS/PAS system, which was developed by SAS some time ago. CTS is a more recent and sophisticated system that makes life easier for those who work with ticketing on a daily basis. Many items that were previously done manually are now performed automatically with CTS.
“CTS is considerably easier to work with”, says Åsa Andersson at Ticket.se in Sweden. “All booking confirmations can be sent via e-mail and sales reports are closed automatically, which saves us a lot of time. The transfer to CTS has also gone extremely smoothly with excellent customer support for technical questions.”
A significant advantage for Amadeus’ customers is that CTS is a global system, thus enabling international travel agency chains to use the same system at all of their branches. Because CTS is used by so many offices over the whole world, the platform is continuously developed and new functions are constantly added. For example, with CTS one can print out an MCO document for additional luggage, deposits and other services that are not visible on normal airline tickets.
“Generally speaking, everything works much more smoothly with CTS, and fewer commands are needed to achieve the same results compared with the old system,” says Julie Stokholm Dahl at Jysk Rejsebureau in Denmark. “One of the best aspects is that it’s so much easier to make refunds.”
In addition to saving both time and money, travel agencies can count on more satisfied customers. With CTS, there is only one way of handling the process surrounding e-tickets, cancellations, refunds and the issuing of tickets, which reduces the risk of error. Furthermore, the system always automatically checks that booked tickets are valid.
Further information about CTS is available at:
http://www.amadeus.com/sca/x19589.xml.
