Amadeus To Unveil E-travel

Amadeus has merged all e-commerce activity into a new unit, called E-travel, expanding the brand name of its recently acquired U.S. corporate self-booking provider based in Waltham, Mass. Executives speaking last month with Business Travel News said the company planned today to announce the "new" E-travel, headed by managing director Ian Wheeler, who will preside over the "one component at a time" convergence of the E-Traveler and Corporate Traveller products.

Amadeus joins Galileo International in axing prior plans to maintain separate product lines after their respective acquisitions of E-travel and Highwire (BTN, Aug. 13, 2001).

"As we deploy new modules, the systems will become more congruent," said Scott Gutz, former CEO of E-travel Inc., who now becomes vice president of global solutions for Amadeus and president and CEO of E-travel North America. "This isn't platform integration, it's new technology," Wheeler said. "We're using a new core technology base that offers an industry standard allowing us to connect multiple platforms. Over time, all of the products will be developed on components, starting with our new hotel component."

Gutz said Amadeus' new hotel shopping capability will require a redesign of the user interface. "The impact to customers will be transparent," he said.

Wheeler said Amadeus now has 170 corporate sites in 23 countries, as well as 123 airline sites for 34 carriers, 15 hotel sites and thousands of agency sites. He said annualizing the company's January figures in all these areas gives it 7 million online segments for the year.

"We're looking to get the whole organization focused on the highest possible return on investment for customers through rapid adoption and piece of mind about reliability and security," Gutz added. Asked about the pace of new distribution arrangements with travel agencies—seen as a key advantage for Amadeus' competitors in terms of corporate online booking—Gutz said E-travel still is working with SatoTravel, which is owned by Denver-based Navigant International, and is "in talks with many more."

The new E-travel unit retains all of the more than 300 employees of the previously disparate organizations from offices in Bangkok, Boston, Madrid and Nice. While Amadeus has clients in 200 countries, E-travel counts 23.