So much for outsourcing.
Using in-house staff, Amadeus opened customer service centers in San Jose, Costa Rica, and Buenos, Argentina, to support travel agencies in 39 countries in the Americas.
The global technology company is calling the two-location effort Amadeus Service Center-Americas. Although the in-house staff in Costa Rica and Argentina will provide Amadeus-specific functional support to Amadeus' travel agency customers, other facilities in Miami, Fla., and Peachtree City, Ga., as well as in Kingston, Jamaica, will provide additional technical support.
Amadeus' outsourcing only goes so far, however. The Georgia and Jamaica facilities, which provide tech support to travel agencies in the U.S. and Canada, are operated by NCR.
The Amadeus-run service centers in Costa Rica and Argentina, however, do replace much of the functional support for travel agencies in North America, which previously was handled by NCR from facilities in Miami and India.
Support for travel agencies in Latin America previously was handled by in-house staff in facilities scattered across the region, and the majority of that functional and tech support will now be consolidated into the new center.
The exception is Brazil: it's customer support operations will remain in that country and won't be handled by the new center for now.
“Amadeus created this new center as part of our mission to improve the quality of customer service across our organization and to showcase our strong commitment to the Americas region,” said Scott Gutz, COO for Amadeus North America, in the press release. “It’s rare these days for any company to handle customer service in-house. We wanted to buck the trend and go beyond what’s expected by today’s business standards.”
Meanwhile, Sabre signed a multifaceted, multi-year agreement with LAN Airlines.
Under the new relationship, Sabre is slated to become LAN's reservation system provider in 2011, a role currently performed by Amadeus and Resiber.
In providing LAN with reservations and operational systems services, LAN will be using SabreSonic Customer Sales and Services and Sabre AirCentre Enterprise Operations.
In addition, LAN, headquartered in Santiago, Chile, and a member of oneworld, signed a multi-year "full-content" distribution agreement with the Sabre global distribution system.