Amadeus Airline Cloud Availability Solves Challenge of Flight Search Volumes

The exponential growth of consumer browsing and shopping for airline products across digital channels has led to a massive, and continuously increasing, volume of shopping transactions.

Airline ‘look-to-book’ ratios – the average number of search requests before a flight booking is actually made – were previously as low as 10:1. Today, these can easily run to 1,000:1.

“Airline companies are facing fluctuating demand which requires the ability to manage a high amount of transactions and strong peaks in traffic,” said Christophe Baroux, Head of Cloud Platform South Europe, Middle East & Africa at Google.

Roland Schuetz, Senior Vice President &CIO Information Passage at Lufthansa, added that “cache-based systems within major shopping engines have certain limitations and they do not accurately reflect our sophisticated revenue management policies.”

A cloud-based dynamic availability solution, Amadeus Airline Cloud Availability will help airlines cope with this huge increase in search and shopping volumes, whilst applying dynamic revenue management strategies and enhancing the user experience.

Amadeus Airline Cloud Availability, which has been successfully piloted by Lufthansa using the Google Cloud Platform infrastructure as a service, enables instances of airline data and revenue management logic to be deployed remotely in the cloud, on all continents to serve local demand.

By synchronising the airline’s central systems and the distributed instances of the airline’s availability calculation in real-time, consumers can search and shop for Lufthansa’s offers more efficiently and receive close to 100% accurate results of the airline’s availability.

At the same time, the airline does not lose out on any sale opportunity by being able to respond to these exponentially growing shopping requests, whilst protecting the airline’s own central systems.

The solution can be scaled up on demand to meet the airline and channel needs offering flexibility and efficiency. Combined with highly automated cloud infrastructure, it copes with any search peak, which means airlines do not need to anticipate such peaks several months in advance.

“Amadeus is in a unique position to provide this ready-made solution to all airlines, including our Altéa customers, deploying and operating the same software in distributed instances with native data synchronization,” said Herve Couturier, Executive Vice President of Research & Development at Amadeus. “Importantly, this fully includes the application of the most advanced Origin-and-Destination revenue management logic.”

Amadeus Airline Cloud Availability was successfully piloted by Lufthansa in the second quarter of 2015, easily absorbing a 20 fold increase in transaction volumes.

“We are thrilled with the initial results of the pilot, which has allowed us to be better prepared for the future,” said Roland Schuetz. “This solution combines our airline industry expertise along with Amadeus technology leadership to deploy a fully scalable remote instance of our content within the proven Google Cloud Platform. With the continuous proliferation of digital channels, this future-proof innovation has opened a new era in real time merchandising.”

Christophe Baroux added that “Google Cloud Platform’s unique capabilities bring the best performance, flexibility and customer experience and we’re very happy to work with Amadeus and Lufthansa on such an innovative project.”