Amadeus says the acquisition of TravelClick is a key element to support "double-digit growth" of its hospitality business.
A deal to the buy the U.S. reservation system provider for $1.52 billion was agreed last week, ending a short period of speculation when the sale price was rumored to be as high as $3 billion.
Speaking to PhocusWire, Amadeus's senior vice president of strategic growth businesses, Francisco Perez-Lozao, says the integration of the company will generate revenue primarily through "cross-selling and increasing the wider customer base" of hotels using the pair's combined services.
The pie is a big one for Amadeus, with it estimating that the addressable market for its hospitality tech services - reservation systems, etc - is in the region of $7 billion.
Integration and the wider tech bounty
The company does not currently separate hospitality tech within its wider IT Solutions recorded revenue, so it is difficult to gauge how much the focus could be worth when placed alongside systems and other platforms that it provides to the airline sector.
Still, Perez-Lozao says that as its strategy matures it is "evolving" how much it sees as an addressable market in the wider sector.
According to Granton Thornton figures cited by Amadeus, IT spend comes in at around 4%-6% of global hotel revenues - a figure somewhere in the $30 billion range in 2017.
Amadeus's focus on reservation systems and other core technology needs in the back-end would account for around a quarter of that, once items such as property wifi, room key technology and in-room entertainment investments are removed.
The plan, beginning upon completion of the deal later in 2018, is to integrate TravelClick into Amadeus Hospitality and create what the company claims will be a "hospitality market leader", going up against the likes of Sabre and Oracle, as well as numerous smaller players.
When asked if an earlier acquisition of TravelClick would have accelerated its ongoing reservation system project with InterContinental Hotels Group, Perez-Lozao says: "TravelClick solutions address a different market segment with high focus and success in the Mid-Chain and in the independent market segments."
Amadeus forecasts full deployment of the IHG system by late-2018 to early-2019.