The North America and Asia-Pacific regions are the star performers for Amadeus' distribution and IT units respectively, with results for 2015 across its entire business showing double-digit growth in both revenues and EBITDA.
Looking at distribution, Amadeus likes to concentrate on the amount of air tickets sold by its travel agency customers. It has broken through the half a billion bookings barrier, with North America growing by 35.6% to reach 85.9m.
North America now accounts for 17% of the 505 million bookings. Western Europe remains its strongest region and became even more dominant in 2015 and is now 41.3% of the total compared with.* It took 38.6% of revenue at the end of 2015. (*Corrected.)
The growth in total non-air bookings through travel agents was less dramatic - 61.2 million in 2015 compared with 59.4 million in 2014.
On the IT side, again it is air where we get the most colour. Its chosen metric of "passengers boarded" shows that airlines using Amadeus handled 747.3 million passengers in 2015 compared with 695.4 million in 2014.
The 7.5% increase comes via migrations onto Amadeus of Korean Air, ANA and Thomas Cook Airlines, with the organic growth up 2.2%. The addition of Korean and ANA is behind a 26.9% jump in APAC numbers, up to 201.3 million from 2014's 166.6 million.
At the start of this year it completed the €766.5 million acquisition of Navitaire, which will add some 490 million to the passengers boarded number in 2016.
Other Amadeus IT plays are mentioned - its hospitality IT unit is very much focused on developing its next generation GRS (guest reservation system) with InterContinental Hotels, "uniting systems known today as Central Reservation Systems (CRS), Property Management Systems (PMS), Revenue Management Systems (RMS), Sales & Catering and others, into a cloud-based platform which is fully centered around the guest experience".
CEO Luis Maroto told analysts on the call that IHG will start using certain elements of the platform in 2017.
Elsewhere, the 2015 Management Review reveals how much Amadeus spent on the various businesses it acquired during the year, the biggest two feeding into its hospitality IT ambitions. The biggest spend was €63.3 million cash on Hotel Systems Pro, a US-based sales, catering and maintenance software provider. Itesso, a cloud-based property management system, cost it €32.7 million.
Smaller deals completed during the year were an €8.2 million deal for Dutch leisure travel tech business Pyton and €13 million on North American airport specialist AirIT.
Topline financial metrics for the business are both up by double-digits - revenue increased 14.5% to €3,912.7 million with EBITDA up 12.2% to €1,465.4 million.
For more information, click here for a video interview with Luis Maroto and an infographic and for links to the press release, presentation and 2015 Management Review.
Background from Tnooz:
Amadeus acquires online booking engine supplier Pyton (Sept 2015)
Amadeus further boosts hospitality arm with acquisition of Hotel SystemsPro (Aug 2015)
Amadeus buys property management system Itesso (July 2015)
Amadeus acquires AirIT, targets North America with airport technology (April 2015)
Related coverage from Tnooz:
Travelport enjoys hotel booking role and payment IT growth (FYs 2015)
Sabre reports continued steady growth, bold forecasts (FYs 2015)
