Amadeus maintains lead ranking as R&D investor in travel and tourism

This is further recognition of our long-standing commitment to R&D and overall dedication to always innovating - creating pioneering travel industry products and initiatives such as Altéa, and more recently examples such as Revenue Accounting or Altéa DCS for Ground Handlers.

During 2013 we invested €505 million in R&D, an increase of 17.1% on 2013, to research and develop technologies for use in the travel sector. This represented 16.3% of our revenues. Our total R&D investment between the years 2004 and 2013 is almost €3 billion.

Nice is our largest site for R&D activities, with on-site and worldwide teams developing solutions for travel distribution, e-commerce, travel agency points-of-sale, airlines and other travel providers. But in addition we have centres in another 16 locations, most recently adding Madrid – see the below map highlighting these locations.

In total around 5,000 employees work to ensure extremely high performance transaction processing, embrace the use of open systems, and pioneer the production and development of advanced technologies such as NoSQL and Distributed Systems. This helps benefit from greater innovation, and respond faster to industry changes and reduce costs.

But we won’t rest on our laurels yet: we aim to continually leverage ground-breaking trends in technology to create original and cost effective solutions that shape the future of travel. For us the future of R&D will always remain about innovating new ways for people to travel, along with providing the technological means by which the tourism industry will serve travellers tomorrow, and beyond.