Amadeus Shows Resilience In 2008

Amadeus, a global leader in technology and distribution solutions for the travel and tourism industry, announced its annual business results for 2008 in June.

According to Amadeus, its revenue grew by 2.2 percent compared with 2007, to some 2,861.4 million euros.

Total travel bookings fell by 2.1 percent year-on-year to 526.6 million euros but travel agency air bookings grew slightly by 0.6 percent to 364.2 million euros.

Amadeus says that this was achieved in a declining market largely thanks to a 1.7 percentage point gain in market share, which gave some protection against the drop in demand.

As a result, Amadeus retains the number one position in travel agency air bookings made through a GDS in 2008 with a market share of 35.6 percent.

Also, in 2008, 193 million passengers boarded airlines using Amadeus’ flagship IT solution, an increase of 55.9 percent over 2007, when 123.8 million passengers boarded.

“Last year was very much a year of two halves: a very strong first-half performance combined with the well-documented collapse in demand in the last six months meant we ended the year about level with 2007,” said the company’s president and chief executive officer, David V. Jones.

As for this year, Mr. Jones underlined that travel agencies made 9.1 percent fewer air bookings through Amadeus in the first quarter of 2009 than in 2008.

“This is slightly better than the GDS market as a whole which, we estimate, fell by 13.2 percent over the same period,” he said.