How data, AI, and collaboration fueled a transformational leap in cruise revenue innovation
This is the second blog post in a series where Amadeus asks our customers and partners about the changes that will transform travel. Today, guest writer Klaus Kohlmayr from IDeaS Revenue Solutions explains how data-driven opportunity analysis, combined with creative partnerships, is a pathway to innovation. You can read a previous blog post in this series here.
Key highlights:
IDeaS is leveraging AI‑driven analytics and advanced revenue management expertise to help travel providers make smarter, forward‑looking decisions in an increasingly uncertain environment.
The collaboration between Amadeus and IDeaS brings together travel technology and revenue management expertise, supporting innovation and resilience across the travel and hospitality ecosystem.
Working with Virgin Voyages, IDeaS helped turn a cruise “green space” into an award‑winning SaaS RMS, with AI embedded across the innovation lifecycle, from forecasting to optimization.
How many room bookings, tickets, or passengers is your travel company expecting tomorrow? What about six months from now? And how should you price your inventory? These are the kinds of questions that we deal with every day.
IDeaS is a leader in forward-looking decision-analytics. We help more than 30,000 clients including hotels, resorts, serviced apartments, outdoor accommodations and parking facilities to optimize their revenue. Our collaboration with Amadeus plays an important role in enabling innovation and resilience across the travel industry. By uniting IDeaS’ industry-leading revenue management and AI-driven analytics with Amadeus’ global travel technology platform, we help our customers navigate challenging times and make smarter revenue decisions.
Two years ago, we had never worked with a cruise company, and recently, our first off-the-shelf solution for cruise lines won RMS Innovation of the Year at the 2025 Travel Tech Breakthrough Awards. How did we get here? Through a structured, data-driven innovation pipeline powered by AI and partnerships.
Only those who innovate can survive the pace of change
It’s a challenging time for businesses to make strategic forward-looking decisions: we are living in a period of great uncertainty, and the pace of change seems to be accelerating by the day. At the same time, we’ve never had access to so much data and powerful tools, like AI and machine learning, to help us make strategic decisions quickly. That’s where we excel.
We have more than 200 team members dedicated exclusively to product R&D, and we are always looking for new opportunities and client partnerships that can help us unlock transformational change in the travel industry.
Our innovation efforts use joint product development, advanced analytics, machine learning and AI to automate decisions so that we can add client value, elevate market position, and reach a broader market. All of this has resulted in increased sales, new customers, and expansion in new regions.
The IDeaS.Lab: Where innovation is structured and data-driven
Our innovation lab uses a rigorous framework to evaluate and score the potential of opportunities across 100+ industries. There’s clearly a lot of green space to explore, and this structure allows us to narrow it down to a small selection of viable opportunities. In our latest round of evaluation, four were selected by an executive team to move to a proof-of-concept stage, with a goal of bringing one to two to market each year.
It was this systematic approach that helped our team identify a big market opportunity in the cruise sector: global cruise revenues are $34.1B and the short-term serviceable addressable market is $15m to 20m. Our opportunity in the cruise sector was clear, but first, we needed to find a customer partner.
Partnerships are central to scaling the IDeaS Innovation Lab
A key component of the IDeaS.Lab is our collaboration with clients and partners to co-develop AI-powered solutions. Collaborations with customers and industry partners—like the integration of our RMS system with Amadeus Demand 360, announced in 2021—are what helps us move the travel industry forward.
For our cruise project, we connected with Virgin Voyages, a Florida-based cruise line founded in 2014. They wanted us to develop a better forecasting model to automatically anticipate future demand and deliver targeted pricing to optimize revenues. With their collaboration, we started on the journey to build a first of its kind SaaS Revenue Management Solution (RMS) for the Cruise industry.
AI is embedded across the innovation lifecycle
From forecasting to optimization, we’ve seen firsthand the value AI and advanced analytics brings to our clients—and we don’t shy away from it in our own decision-making and product development. In our research stage, we use AI to accelerate data collection, generate comprehensive summaries, and explore multiple perspectives.
AI is built into all of our solutions. Machine learning and AI allow us to process vast amounts of data rapidly, running multiple forecasts and scenarios. This allows us to automatically generate decision recommendations that have a real, positive impact on the bottom line for thousands of our clients worldwide.
The embrace of innovation is in our DNA at IDeaS, and for good reason. A recent McKinsey report shows companies ranked in the top quartile for innovation generate 3.4x more shareholder return than those in the bottom quartile.1 Additionally, organizations with a formalized innovation process report 2.7x higher profit margins.2 But beyond the stats and figures, our founders’ passion for pushing the boundaries of what’s possible through revenue science is at the heart of our origin story—and the spark remains for finding the next frontier of effective, applied AI and analytics.Management Solution (RMS) for the Cruise industry.
Charting the future of transformational change
Our structured approach, strong partnerships, and AI-driven insights turned an ambitious idea into an award-winning cruise RMS. This category-defining product is reshaping revenue management. That’s how transformational innovation takes root at IDeaS.Lab. Our R&D team is already setting sail on next year’s big ideas. If you want to hop on board, get in touch. Who knows where the wind will take us.
1McKinsey Global Innovation Survey, 2024
2Boston Consulting Group Innovation Performance Analysis, 2023
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