Amadeus delivered group revenue of almost €1.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up 3% year over year.
The Spain-based distribution company increased operating income almost 3% to €475 million while adjusted EBIT was up 4.5% to €500 million.
The company said its growth slowed in March because of the conflict in the Middle East, adding that the short-term future is hard to call.
“We are positive about the future and firmly focused on long‑term growth. We continue to expand our reach across the travel ecosystem, increase the number of customers adopting our solutions, broaden the range of solutions used by our customers, expand our AI capabilities and demonstrate the transversal strength of our portfolio,” said Luis Maroto, president and CEO of Amadeus.
He added that the company continues to invest in technology such as biometrics as part of its “broader ambition to become an orchestrator of an AI‑enabled travel ecosystem.”
In late April, Amadeus announced plans to acquire biometric technology specialist Idemia for €1.2 billion. The deal is expected to close in the middle of the year.
During a call with analysts, Maroto pushed back on claims made during Sabre's Q1 earnings call by CEO Kurt Ekert that Amadeus holds a "dominant, monopoly position" in the market on the passenger service systems side.
"We have always competed on the strength of our technology, the openness of our platform, as well as the value we create for customers across the ecosystem. Our solutions are chosen because we deliver the best outcome for our customers," said Maroto.
The company increased revenue for its air IT solutions business 7.5% to €593 million, attributed to an increase in passengers boarded.
Revenue for the hospitality and other solutions unit rose 3% to €268 million, while air distribution revenue in Q1 saw a slight increase to €822 million, up from just over €821million year over year.
On Q1 artificial intelligence (AI) developments, Marota shared a recent use case revealed at Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas. It combined Google Cloud, Gemini, Google Maps and Amadeus technology to "unlock more intelligent and hyper-personalized traveler experiences."
"In this use case, Amadeus remains responsible for the core recommendation logic and decisioning, while Google Maps is used to enrich results with hyper-local context," he said.
Maroto also touched on monetization for agentic AI and said Amadeus would price based on the value delivered to customers.
"In some cases, it will be part of our overall solution, but hopefully we’ll be able to really charge more or upsell based on the quality of what we deliver. In some specific cases, of course, there could be some things very independent related to agentic AI that we’ll monetize independently," he said.
Amadeus also said it is exploring specialized AI agents that “could understand trip context, anticipate traveler needs and autonomously complete tasks on the traveler’s behalf.”
The development is part of its collaboration with Amazon Web Services.
In a collaboration with Microsoft, it also tested an agentic AI commerce solution for airline call centers with a carrier. The technology enables multi-lingual conversations with a voice-based agent across multiple touchpoints.
Research and development investment in Q1 was €335 million, down 6% year over year largely because of completed migrations to the cloud. The company said 50% of R&D was devoted to developing its solutions, 30% on customer implementations and 20% on partnerships with Microsoft and Google.