Amadeus has reported revenue of €2 billion for 2020, a drop of 61% compared with 2019.
The distribution giant says that while there was a slight improvement in air traffic in the final quarter of the year, the pandemic continued to severely impact travel.
The company’s EBITDA for the year was down 90% to €223 million and profit dipped 124% to a loss of €302 million.
Luis Maroto, president and CEO , says Amadeus made cost savings of €500 million in 2020 and ended 2020 with liquidity of €3.5 billion.
He adds: “Despite the shock to travel last year, many of our customers continued to invest in technology for future growth. We signed new NDC contracts while agreeing important deals in our IT Solutions segments and expanding our content agreements.
"In hospitality and airports, we saw increasing interest from our customers in our business intelligence and self-service solutions. We remain optimistic about the future of travel and are confident that once movement restrictions are lifted, travel will resume, and the industry will flourish once more”.
The company plains to retain the fixed costs reduction program in 2021 and make a further €50 million in cost savings.
For the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2020, revenue was €474 million and a loss of €88 million.
Distribution revenue was €162.5 million while IT solutions was €312 million, down 78% and 49% respectively.
Amadeus says its move to the cloud and its “digital and customer-service transformation measures” will help get its through the current challenging environment.
The company has announced a partnership with Microsoft which will see it move to the public cloud over the next three to five years.
According to a statement, the partnership will enable Amadeus to “harness cloud technology to innovate and explore new products and solutions and create smoother travel experiences.”
It adds that moving to the cloud will give the company “increased flexibility to scale its operational capacity up or down or to adjust it as needed given market and demand conditions.”
Almost two years ago Amadeus said it was looking to achieve 100% cloud infrastructure as it announced the transfer of its Master Pricer shopping application to Google Cloud.
Commenting on the Microsoft partnership, an Amadeus spokesperson said: “While we are investing in this new partnership, including the co-funded innovation program, that does not preclude the possibility to work with other providers in the future.
"Indeed, as increasingly our vendors and partners are also operating out of the public cloud, we will invariably have a distributed footprint across the hyperscalers, matched to our evolving needs.”
Amadeus says its deal with Microsoft is part of plans to strengthen the company for the future, with NDC and the companies hospitality technology also part of the focus.