Amadeus Revives ‘The Human Touch’
by Michele McDonaldFive years ago, Amadeus was working on a new desktop that it thought would radically change the way agents work.
Called Amadeus One, the desktop would be able to manage content from multiple sources and work in multiple GDS modes. It was part of a suite of new tools designed for North American corporate agencies.
It got a lot of attention, and some big agencies signed on to test it.
They tested and tested. They tested some more.
Dazed and confused
It was like a “show kitchen” that was “dumping a lot of technology onto the travel agent’s food tray,” Florian Tinnus, head of corporate IT, global corporations and resellers, said. Some users felt confused and overwhelmed.
Meanwhile, the world was changing.
New standard desktops made it easier to flip back and forth between cryptic commands and graphical interfaces. Big Data and social collaboration were becoming the order of the day.
Everyone was talking about the human touch and relevance and, above all, the customer experience.
“Amadeus One was a very technical approach,” Tinnus said. “But maybe we didn’t think through the human touch. We believe that great technology can do amazing things, but it needs to make everyone feel better.”
Amadeus wasn’t asking whether the customer really needed to be quite that amazed.
In the end, Amadeus did an about-face, shelving the desktop project earlier this year but keeping the best features of it – a new profile system, for example — for Amadeus Selling Platform Connect, its standard desktop for both corporate and leisure travel agencies.
It defined its new mindset in a white paper titled “Cleared for take-off: Strategies in Lean IT and how they’re relevant to the travel business.
The human equation
In travel services, it said, “leanness begins with front-line, customer-facing human beings – their brains and their morale. What counts is the ability of staff always to add to customer value, by (1) accurately sensing what the customer’s true purpose is, and (2) anticipating and responding to that purpose in a rapid and supple manner.”
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After shutting down the desktop project, Amadeus began working on a new platform that is “more of a corporate portal with leisure-driven search mechanisms, according to Tinnus.
Using heuristics (computer analysis of a customer’s habits), predictive analysis, and what Amadeus likes to call “smart search,” the system “will know what flight you want to take, and it will have an offer ready for you,” he said.
Making it simpler
Rather than forcing the agent and the traveler to comb through dozens of flight options, Amadeus narrows the choices down to the best fit, the best price and the most popular.
This requires an element of trust, and U.S. customers take to this approach more readily than their European counterparts, Tinnus said.
In Europe, they say, “I want to see all my options.” But, he said, “if you trust me and my system, it’s click, buy, done.”
Amadeus also is working with Microsoft Outlook to streamline the process even further.
Say you want to have an off-premise meeting. You will be able to click the date in the calendar system and inform colleagues. The system will know you have to travel and when, so it will build the trip around your needs, applying your profile, history, preferences and policy. It will check availability, look at transport modes and give you the best offer.
Tinnus calls these streamlined approaches “simplexity.”
“We cannot change the complexity of the travel world,” he said. “But we can put all the complexity into a brown bag and make it easier for us.”
