ORLANDO -- Amadeus unveiled technology at the PhoCusWright Conference that it believes will change how travel is sold.
But perhaps equally important to travel agents, the sequencing of the rollout sets a new pattern for how – and to whom – the GDS is likely to deploy cutting-edge technology going forward.
The new technology, called Extreme Search, is being marketed under the name Amadeus Affinity Shopper.
It begins with leisure travelers describing vacation parameters other than destination. They may put in available dates and other criteria, such as "near a golf course," "great food" and "family destination," as well as the price they’d like to pay.
The Extreme Search engine returns options within the stated parameters, and those options may be in a wide variety of destinations.
"You do not always enter a store looking for a blue shirt or a striped tie," Ian Wheeler, vice president of Amadeus, said in a statement. "In the same way, you do not always know if you want to go to Mexico, Miami or the Bahamas, but you do know you want to go to the beach.
"A traveler can narrow that search to 'beach vacations, anytime between November and January where the temperature is 80 degrees,' and relevant destinations from across the globe would be displayed."
Amadeus said the technology was designed to appeal to a new breed of traveler dubbed the "amateur expert," who is described as being "more knowledgeable, more adventurous and more likely to live in an emerging economy than ever before – and whose rise coincides with …the growth of niche travel in the post-recessionary environment."
Amadeus Affinity Shopper is debuting on Lufthansa’s consumer website. In an interview with Travel Weekly, Amadeus CEO David Jones said the sequence of the rollout of the new technology – airline site first, then large online travel agencies, then other travel agencies with booking capability on their website, sets a pattern for future technology deployment.
Jones said a couple of other airline sites are "close behind" the Lufthansa launch.
"Relatively early next year – first quarter, I’m told – we’ll have something available for the online travel agencies," Jones said. "Not just the mega-names, though they are likely to be our launch customers because the presentation needs to be tailored for each website, and there’s a small administrative overhead cost. But it’s modest compared to the cost an individual website would have to pay to develop this technology."
Vacation.com, the largest travel agency consortium, is wholly owned by Amadeus, but Jones did not see the new technology being deployed by V-com agencies "in the immediate future."
"I doubt that very much," he said. "If an individual Vacation.com agency has a good web presence, then why not, but this would be later than first quarter, for sure.
"Many innovations are going to be rolled out this way going forward," he continued. "Doing this for one airline is complicated, and that’s just one airline. If it’s for five or 50 airlines, it’s many times more complex. The process of rolling out innovation on one [supplier] website, then the next segment going to online travel agencies, that’s the way the world is going."
Jones did not want to leave the impression, however, that individual travel agencies are not important to Amadeus.
"If you start thinking that the only thing that matters is big customers, you can start heading south pretty quickly," he said. "We’ve always had the philosophy that we have an interest in every customer, and I’m talking about individual travel agencies, because if you add up all the small ones, you’ve got a big business.
"There are an infinite number of niche travel interests. Our organization is set up in such a way that small decisions get as much concentrated focus a big ones."