Recent addition from the leisure segment
More and more agencies in the private travel sector are connecting to Amadeus GDS. During the spring, agreements were signed with both Airtours and Jambo Tours and the implementations are currently underway.
Vesna Jekic, Customer Segment Manager, Amadeus Scandinavia, is pleased about the increased influx of private travel agencies in recent years and maintains that over the long term, this creates advantages not only for all of the players in the industry, but also for travellers.
“More players from the private travel market means more final customers and over the long term, this drives the range of offers forward, as regards the content of the GDS and new IT solutions,” Vesna says. “At the same time, the average person is travelling more and more and people want to place the same demands as private travellers that they do as business travellers.”
100,000 travellers
Richard Johansson, Managing Director for Airtours, agrees. According to him, it is not only about increased demands, but also increased influx of customers. Airtours currently has about 100,000 travellers every year, and Richard says that the decision to go over to Amadeus in the end was simple.
“Amadeus’ system has several advantages over our old system, for example that flight prices and other information are updated much more often and the advantages of this grow in pace with increased volume. There is, quite simply, a higher quality of information. Amadeus is furthermore on the leading edge as regards incorporating low-cost carriers into the system and it is important for us to have access to their offers,” says Richard Johansson.
Integration with airline companies
For Jambo Tours, the transition was about making their customers’ travels simpler and more secure. Previously, there were often gaps in communication with the airline systems. Far too often, completed reservations were not registered and were not accessible in the airline and hotel check-in systems.
“Unfortunately, this happened many times with devastating results for the travellers, who for example were forced to check in again at the transfer airport or even missed their connecting flight. This is absolutely unacceptable. The problems primarily arose when the travellers checked in with electronic tickets on trips where the connecting and transfer flights were combined in two or more steps. However, this is the situation on many of our trips. The GDS is better integrated with the airline systems and by using Amadeus as our primary booking system, we avoid these problems,” says Kent Wallstedt, Managing Director for Jambo Tours.
