How Amadeus is orchestrating AI for the benefit of the travel industry
Levels of interest and excitement about the impact of AI on the travel industry have reached fever pitch over recent weeks. Rightly so.
A future where AI assistants can inspire travelers with advice on unique experiences is very welcome.
So too is the ability of AI assistants to return highly relevant options and, beyond that, to help end users with booking, payment, and servicing, with their partner of their choice.
But this future at scale isn't here yet and important work must be undertaken before it can be fully realized.
At Amadeus, we are very excited by AI assistants and their potential to transform the travel experience. But to deliver seamless experiences for travelers, AI assistants require an efficient access to a wealth of dynamic data at scale in a trusted framework. And this requires a well-connected and well-orchestrated ecosystem.
Let’s take a look at why, and how Amadeus proposes to address the corresponding challenges.
From fragmentation to scalability
Today’s travel ecosystem remains extremely fragmented with multiple providers operating on a wide variety of systems (many of them traditional) according to several different industry standards, and sometimes even different versions of the same standard.
A good illustration of this is the on-going retailing transformation airlines are going through where they will adopt the new “offers and orders” standard while introducing dynamic pricing capabilities that align air fares to market conditions.
These innovations, while promising benefits for passengers and airlines, add complexity during the transition rather than reduce it: multiple versions of traditional EDIFACT and evolving NDC standards create a fragmented environment, making it difficult for AI assistants to access data efficiently, whether for contextualized search or actions like booking and servicing.
From a performance standpoint, the travel industry has already experienced the impact of the “Look-to-Book” ratio exploding as more interactions moved online.
Agentic AI could amplify this trend even further, generating a surge in “look” transactions as AI assistants explore countless options on behalf of travelers. If unmanaged, this could strain systems and create inefficiencies.
In short, AI assistants need reliable and easy access to dynamic content at scale, from every corner of the travel industry, delivered in a trusted framework, while optimizing resource consumption.
This means there is a clear role for an orchestration layer that connects travel suppliers, travel sellers, metasearch companies and AI assistants to one another, facilitating the work of the AI companies by providing a ready-made and efficient foundation for agents.
Our goal is to help the industry address these challenges responsibly, ensuring that every interaction remains efficient and sustainable.
Building trust in an AI-driven travel ecosystem
Realizing the promise of AI will require more than technology, connectivity and well-organized content. Of equal importance are trust and neutrality.
Trust and neutrality have been essential to every new phase of digital development in the travel space.
In the early days of e-commerce, the travel industry needed to build trust and ensure that travelers felt comfortable not only with the choices they were presented with, but also to enter their payment details for a service that would be delivered in the future. More recently, privacy concerns have reinforced the need for companies to earn the trust of customers to collect and use their data.
When it comes to AI, this issue is supercharged.
Travelers must feel confident that the systems managing their data, preferences and transactions do it with the required safeguards around privacy, security and compliance.
Equally important is ensuring that all suppliers, from global brands to niche providers, can be represented in this new ecosystem.
AI assistants must have access to a broad, diverse set of options to deliver meaningful value to travelers.
This inclusivity ties directly to the principles of trust and neutrality: travelers and suppliers alike need confidence that the ecosystem is fair, transparent, and not skewed toward a select few.
At Amadeus we deeply believe in responsible innovation. This means we invest heavily in cybersecurity, transparency, compliance and resilience as a solid foundation for innovation that engenders trust at every level.
We are approaching agentic AI with the same philosophy – trust first.
Collaboration, innovation and industry leadership
While individual companies are already making significant contributions to the development and adoption of AI, no single player can address the challenges alone. As usual, the true benefits will be realized through collaboration.
This wave of technological development is fast but also complex. It’s not simply a matter of creating AI agents and hooking them to an API. The assets needed to facilitate effective, responsible AI are spread across organizations and this wave of innovation is also about bringing them together.
We intend to contribute Amadeus’ deep travel industry knowledge to work with key stakeholders as AI unfolds.
This collaboration is already well underway. We are actively engaging with AI players on agentic AI, combining their in-depth expertise and powerful agentic capabilities with our own applications and systems across the travel industry.
Orchestrating the travel ecosystem
While Generative AI has already positively transformed how travel is planned, it will not remove the need for fragmented content to be aggregated in a very efficient way to enable the seamless, neutral and trustable consumption of travel.
In fact, the fast-growing usage of AI assistants is likely to increase the need for well-orchestrated content that can be accessed efficiently, and it is our intention to deliver this industry orchestrator connecting the different players in a trusted and neutral way.
This is what Amadeus has done since its inception, at scale, with success, together with all travel stakeholders and throughout many technological evolutions. We see our role as an orchestrator, not only of content and transactions, but also of people, companies and relationships. That’s our belief at Amadeus and it’s where we’re placing our bets and focusing our investments.
Amadeus aims to support the travel industry’s collective evolution, embracing an AI-driven future built on openness, trust and collaboration. Whether you are a partner, customer, or general stakeholder, I invite you to engage with our team so we can create the next era of travel together.
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