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Celebrating 25 years: A cherished career from the beginning
Diane Kosinski
Group Communications, Amadeus IT Group
As I was browsing through the job section of a local newspaper in Madrid – a large advertisement caught my eye for a new company created by Air France, Iberia, Lufthansa and SAS in October of 1987.
Editor’s Note: It’s been 25 years since Amadeus was founded and in celebration of this special occasion we’re recognising employees who have been with us from the beginning. Throughout the week this blog will feature posts by longtime Amadeus employees
– giving them an opportunity to reflect on their experiences here.
The ad exclaimed; “The biggest needs the best”. I applied and got the job.
Little did I know that nearly a quarter of a century later – 24 years and 7 months to be exact – I would still be at the same company.
I remember my first day walking into the corporate headquarters, seeing rows of empty desks and only a handful of people in the Madrid office. We were a small family back then, less than twenty employees in Madrid. The Sophia Antipolis and Erding sites did not yet exist. We were working on a dream, developing an idea into something that would revolutionize the way the world connects. And we did this without email, smart phones, or powerpoint. I clearly remember Hans Jorgensen explaining to me the concept of lan printers… WOW… high technology!
In order to book an air ticket for business travel, we manually flipped through large directories which resembled telephone yellow-pages, finding city pairs, and rang up our founder airlines to request paper tickets which had to be sent over by messengers. It seems like only yesterday.
I cannot recall what year it was, but there was a point when the growth at Amadeus was so exponential, I could no longer keep up with learning the new names. And now, almost 25 years later, there are thousands of employees around the globe. It still amazes me.
Amadeus has grown by leaps and bounds – but the sentiment that we are doing something special in facilitating travel for hundreds of millions of people remains the same. You can still feel the energy. You can still feel the creativity. That buzz still exists.
I look back on the past 25 years with a sense of history and accomplishment – from our first PNR in 1992, the opening of our first regional offices around the world, the first marketing conferences, the first customer conferences, so many firsts – and look to the future knowing that my colleagues will continue to carry the torch with the same feeling of pride and enthusiasm, because the biggest still does have the very best.
You can explore the highlights of our history via our Facebook timeline and we invite you to leave a comment below if you have any fond memories to share. Also, you can have a look at all the posts related to our 25th anniversary here .