Amadeus has identified a number of ways its partnership with Microsoft will boost travel industry innovation and improve the traveler experience.
The partnership, which was announced in February, was positioned as a move to the cloud within three to five years as well as collaboration on new products and services through an innovation program.
Amadeus has provided some more detail on projects in its Journey to Cloud Planet report more intuitive travel search in the future and predictive disruption management.
Key to the developments is a ‘data mesh’ which Amadeus says it is “perfecting with Microsoft” and describes it as “the next evolution of a data lake.”
The hope is that using Microsoft Azure AI, the travel industry will be able to get more value from data by allowing different segments to access data and join up the dots in a customer’s journey.
Amadeus says it has created a Traveler Centric Platform which enables travel suppliers to share journey insights and data on common customers.
The two companies are already exploring the potential for intuitive search by combining Amadeus data with Natural Language Processing technology from Microsoft.
Yves Rault, program manager for data platform & partners, Amadeus, says: “Using NLP, travelers can describe their trip verbally or through written text, and search capabilities that harness public cloud infrastructure will compute billions of possible itineraries before returning a small number of highly relevant options.
"This has the potential to drastically simplify the experience of searching for travel, reducing the number of websites a traveler visits and delivering tailored results that dramatically improve conversion.”
Handling airline disruptions is another the companies are working together with public cloud computing and machine learning combined to help Amadeus predict disruption and offer re-accommodation to travelers before they have departed.
The global distribution giant is also looking at ways to use boost productivity in the corporate travel world.
A final area of development for Amadeus, Microsoft and other technology providers is the implementation of a new cloud-based cybersecurity defense system.
According to the Amadeus report "the system is based on a vision and strategy to ‘trust no one and verify everything, continuously’."
Rival distribution giant Sabre, which announced its 10-year partnership with Google Cloud in January 2020, has also updated on developments recently.
Travelport announced it was moving to cloud hosting using Amazon Web Services in June describing it as its bid to accelerate the digital transformation of retailing in the travel industry."