Amadeus Service Disruption Hits Agencies, Travelers

A problem with a network component caused a three-hour disruption of service by Amadeus systems that began in the afternoon of Jan. 30, central Europe time.

Both the GDS and the Amadeus Altéa passenger services system – the suite of solutions that controls reservations, inventory and departure control for hosted airlines – were affected.

Amadeus GDS subscribers were affected directly, while travel agencies on other GDS systems were unable to book airlines that use the Altéa platform.

Airline passengers could not purchase tickets or check in online. At airports, affected airlines such as Finnair resorted to manual check-in. Rather than scanning passports, they input passenger information manually, a process that delayed some flights.

Impact on agencies
The Amadeus outage hit both leisure and corporate travel agencies, some of which also were forced to fall back on manual booking and ticketing procedures.

Even after the main problem was resolved, Amadeus said that “some travel agency customers may continue to experience service disruption which we are investigating.”

BCD Travel, a multinational travel management company based in Amsterdam, tweeted that performance of the systems across Europe, the Middle East and Africa was “very inconsistent,” with issuance of a single ticket taking 15 minutes.

About 20 minutes later, BCD said Amadeus was “working, with all fulfillment taking place.”

‘Out of luck’
At the Travel Company Edinburgh, in Scotland, managing director Ken McNab said, “We were unable to get anything out of (Amadeus) for most of the day.

“A lot of organizations use Amadeus direct or through the airlines’ self-booking tools. They were out of luck,” said McNab, who is president of the American Society of Travel Agents chapter in the U.K.

Customers who were trying to book last-minute travel “just disappeared,” McNab said. “They couldn’t move.”

“We were just starting to get occasional bits and pieces back online when we closed for the day on Tuesday. I’m not sure that everything is back up yet this morning,” he told Travel Market Report early on Wednesday.

Agents were left trying to use airline self-booking tools or even calling airlines on behalf of clients. “Ingenuity was the rule of the day,” said McNab. He added that at his firm Skyscanner (www.skyscanner.net) was the most effective work-around during the Amadeus outage.

Non-Amadeus agencies also affected
Amadeus wasn’t the only problem, he added. The Travel Company Edinburgh uses Amadeus for its self-booking tool and Galileo as its primary GDS. With Amadeus offline, Travelport performance slowed to a crawl, possibly due to increased usage.

“The Amadeus problem crossed the circuits and slowed down Travelport,” he said. “The problem, whatever it was, impacted quite a lot of agencies even if they were not Amadeus agencies.”

Amadeus updates
Amadeus issued periodic statements through its corporate blog, but they were very brief. On Jan. 31, it confirmed that the incident had been resolved and that all systems had recovered from the outage.

Various newspapers in Europe, including the U.K.’s Telegraph and the Netherlands’ de Telegraaf, reported that “thousands” of passengers were affected, but Amadeus did not confirm that estimate.