An alliance between Google and Amadeus might once have seemed strange, but the two companies have now partnered to help airlines with fare display on the search engine.
While Amadeus has been working closely with Finnair on adopting continuous pricing for some time as part of its retail transformation, the carrier saw the accuracy of fares dropping on Google Flight Search.
"What we saw with continuous pricing is the issue of non-discrete fares, availability and inventory, and that meant the target kept moving on us," said Asif Khan, head of travel partnerships at Google.
"We're a cache-based system—that's what we do on our end. There's no system in the world that can answer our queries in real-time, so that's what we've optimized to. With continuous pricing, that started changing a lot more frequently than it had before, so we had to come up with some ideas and different ways of doing it."
Khan, who was speaking at the recent Amadeus Altitude 25 airline event, was joined by Jenni Suomela, vice president of global sales and channel management for Finnair.
While the companies were grappling with the accuracy issue, Finnair was also concerned about dropping off Google's display, as well as losing the benefits of dynamic pricing.
Amadeus MetaConnect technology enabled Google Flight Search to connect to Finnair's dynamic offer management to ensure up-to-date pricing, thereby improving the quality "without compromising the performance," according to Soumela.
She also shared the key considerations for the airline in having Google as an acquisition channel: ensuring relevant offers for the travel customer based on intent, communicating the value of those offers and brand visibility.
Khan said that Google's goal of aligning with "the intent of the user" to provide them with "actionable results" was very much in line with Finnair's desire to optimize revenue.
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"MetaConnect, for example, here worked really well for us," he said.
"We understand there are several different flavors of this. Eventually we don't want to be in the business of having all these bespoke type of solutions that we have in place. We'd like to get towards a uniformity of what we're talking about. If it's MetaConnect or some other variant of that, we welcome it."
Amadeus quietly announced its work with Google Flight Search via a blog post around the same time as the Altitude 25 event.
The company is collaborating with Google to "transform the way airlines manage their offers," said Elena Avila, executive vice president of travel distribution for Amadeus, in the post.
"For airlines, this means greater control over their commercial strategies, distributing dynamic offers more efficiently and with increased pricing accuracy, ultimately enhancing the overall user experience on Google Flights. This collaboration will enhance the display of airline flights on Google, increasing lead generation and enabling airlines to reach a wider audience. With Amadeus’ detailed reporting and accurate KPI measurement, airlines can gain valuable insights and improve their market presence," Avila said.
During the event, Khan also gave a glimpse into how travel search might change going forward, with visual search potentially playing more of a role as well as the end of origin- and destination-based search.
"We do think search is going to change significantly. We're seeing the vast majority of searches now being initiated by images, for example, so we do think that is going to cross over into travel and how folks are thinking about travel. We'll see what comes, but needless to say having accurate, robust data [and] having unfettered access to data is probably the key solution for the future," he said.
*The reporter's attendance at the Altitude 25 event was supported by Amadeus.