Alison Guillot
Amadeus IT Group has long wanted to diversify from airline-related services, and its hospitality division has recently made gains.
- Today, more than 50,000 properties buy at least some software for hotel operations from the Madrid-based travel technology company.
- Two of the world’s three-largest hotel companies now use Amadeus’s core tech. In November, Marriott International signed up to replace its central reservation system with one built by Amadeus. That deal follows IHG [InterContinental Hotels Group], which migrated over to Amadeus’s system before the pandemic started.
- Wyndham has in the past year signed up for some of Amadeus’s tools.
- Last month, Aimbridge Hospitality, the largest U.S. hotel management company, said it would use Amadeus’s business intelligence tools.
- In 2021, Amadeus’s “hospitality and other solutions” revenue — the majority of which was generated by hotel-related sales — was approximately $550 million (€538.6 million).
Amadeus faces a competitive field
- Amadeus does sell tech a la carte. But its ideal vision is for hotels to buy a platform, meaning an array of interrelated tools from a single provider.
- In hotel software, Oracle Hospitality and Shiji Group have similar approaches and are in talks with giant hotel groups.
- Other platform players include Cloudbeds, Yanolja, Protel, Jonas Software, and Mews — depending on how you interpret things.
- Given Amadeus’s broad ambitions, its products compete with the offerings of dozens of vendors.
Nearly every hotel company large and small is today piecing together their hotel tech from multiple providers. None have moved all key functions to the cloud yet. So in a sense, Amadeus is helping to create a new platform-based hotel solution market, rather than stealing shares from others.
To learn about Amadeus’s strategy, I [Sean O’Neill] spoke with the top boss of its hospitality effort, Francisco Pérez-Lozao Rüter — widely known as Paco. Pérez-Lozao said the company has three aspirational goals.
“We want to drive demand for hoteliers across any channel, that’s number one,” Pérez-Lozao said. “Not only the GDS [global distribution system], but also through metasearch and OTAs [online travel agencies]. We have a large practice around digital advertising, for example.”
“The second is to help hotels provide the best guest experience possible with the help of better IT [information technology].”
“Our third leg is to grow our market-leading practice in hotel BI [business intelligence] to help hotels improve their decision-making.”
