Like all great love stories, the partnership between Amadeus and Adobe started off as a crush. In 2007, Amadeus started using the Adobe Creative Cloud and Omniture as suppliers to analyze our website. Over the next decade, this crush blossomed.
In 2017, we started using Adobe Experience Manager Sites&Assets, Adobe Target and migrated from Omniture to Adobe Analytics to help Amadeus.com deliver more personalized experiences. In 2018, the two companies formed apartnership to integrate the Adobe Experience Cloud in the Amadeus Digital Experience Suite, to give airlines the unparalleled ability to create more targeted and personalized experiences across all digital touchpoints.
This was the beginning of a great partnership that would have a lasting impact on airline marketing and the travel industry. Today, I’m speaking with Jose Garrido, Retail and Travel Lead at Adobe, about what we’ve accomplished together so far, how it has benefited travelers, and our shared vision for the future of travel.
SUSANA: Why is Adobe interested in the travel space, and what is the main issue you think you can help us solve?
JOSE: At Adobe, we realized that many travel companies like airlines, online travel agencies, airports, and hotel chains do not know their travelers and guests as well as they want to. This makes delivering personalized digital experiences really hard. Many travel companies are looking for insights into the personas of their customers so they can better target their offers, but they are unable to. Since Adobe decided to transform digitally in 2008 making the transition of our B2C GTM from our brick and mortar partners to adobe.com, we bet heavily into customer knowledge to improve the experience for our customers with more personalized experiences. This made us become experts in digital experiences and decided to present to the market the solution we put together: the first Marketing Cloud suite of solutions. We knew this expertise could help fill this gap.
SUSANA: Why did Adobe want to partner with Amadeus?
JOSE: The travel space is vast, global, and surprisingly complicated. Amadeus can certainly help us understand the specific needs of airlines and other travel companies. Our current collaboration with Amadeus gave us an immediate and intimate understanding of travel search and booking flows and we will surely have access to a broader network of airlines who can trust our joint expertise with Amadeus. A true travel company with a 30-year reputation of excellence. In addition, like Adobe, Amadeus is a technology company, so we knew that we could speak the same language and build something together that would be very specifically targeted to the needs of the travel industry.
Adobe is the leader in delivering End-to-End personalized experiences and Amadeus is an expert in Travel which is letting us grow in Travel. That’s why partnerships like this one are just so critically important. By working together, I think Amadeus and Adobe were able to really speed up the time to market and give airlines and other travel marketers a leg up in the digital marketing space much faster than if either of us had attempted to achieve the same thing alone.
SUSANA: We talk a lot about hyper-personalization, what is this about and why is it important?
JOSE: Ok, let’s say you’re an airline and you have one customer who is a frequent business traveler, they never check a bag, but they love pre-selecting their meal. It wouldn’t make sense to push them through the same marketing or booking flow as a family with two kids, several bags, and an interest in booking in-destination content like a rental car or family activities. Hyper-personalization allows travel marketers to segment their customers in an easy-to-use online platform so they can better target their advertising and tweak their booking flow to match those traveler’s personal interests and expectations. That’s what hyper-personalization is all about.
JOSE: How has Amadeus used the power of the Adobe Experience Platform to give airlines access to this level of hyper-personalization?
SUSANA: Thanks to the integration of the Adobe Experience Platform into ours, airline marketers can create unique traveler segments in Amadeus Traveler DNA—using traveler attributes such as preferred ancillary and additional data points—that can connect with Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform.
Once the traveler segments are created, airline marketers can use the Adobe Experience Platform to develop exceptional offers for each segment and trigger customized messaging based on traveler behavior in real-time. That means no two traveler groups will receive the same message at the same time.
JOSE: How do you think this partnership has benefited travelers?
SUSANA: For travelers, this alliance has been a transformative experience. The integration of Amadeus' travel data ensures that travelers get what they want, when they need it, which is a real game changer for them. With this level of customized marketing, each traveler is treated as an individual, and their digital travel experience can be as exclusive as their Spotify playlist. We’re really proud of this innovation, and we’ve received great feedback from our airline partners so far.
Another key highlight for travelers is the multi-channel engagement capability, enabling interactions between travel brands and travelers through various platforms like their mobile, web, email, or social media. This ensures a consistent and seamless experience across all digital channels for convenience and accessibility.
SUSANA: How has Adobe benefited from its partnership with Amadeus?
JOSE:
One thing that’s great about our collaboration with Amadeus is that its travel data is almost unparalleled in scope. Thanks to our partnership, we were able to actually integrate this travel data, as well as Amadeus’ search and booking solutions within the Adobe Experience Platform. With all of this data, airline marketers can target relevant travel inspiration—including targeted emails, and cross-channel digital advertising—to unique search, booking, and servicing experiences for different kinds of travelers. All this can reduce the time a traveler spends booking their trip, it’s more convenient, and we find that it can really improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
We are also working on further ideas together including use cases such as data-driven digital marketing campaigns being those campaigns boosted by our GenAI capabilities across the entire customer journey. For data-driven digital marketing campaigns, our use case shows how to use data and analytics to create targeted, inspiring, and persuasive ads that can attract and engage consumers at every stage of the travel funnel and increase bookings and loyalty.
The second use case demonstrates how to provide real-time travel content and workflow applications, and to interact with consumers in a personalized and timely manner.
JOSE: And how has this partnership with Adobe benefited Amadeus?
SUSANA: Amadeus is an expert in the travel space, but we work with so many different partners and across so many different fields – from search, to booking, to airline, airport, and hotel IT – that it would have been a much longer road for us to also become experts in digital marketing and customer service software all on our own. We could have done it, but it would have taken time to do it right, and we knew this was an urgent matter for our customers. This was a pain point that we wanted to help airlines address quickly, and this partnership really sped up that process for us – and for them.
JOSE: And what is the next area that Amadeus hopes we can tackle together?
SUSANA: We’ve already made great progress with more personalized digital marketing for airlines, but we want to continue improving and refining these capabilities. It would also be great to bring similar opportunities to other parts of the travel industry like hotel marketers for instance. And with the incredible improvements in AI and cloud computing, there are endless opportunities for more instant digital marketing campaigns that respond to traveler needs. There is truly a world of opportunities to explore in this space, and we’re confident that working together, we will really be able to make a big impact and set new benchmarks for customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
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