History
Amadeus was originally created as a neutral global distribution system (GDS) by Air France, Iberia, Lufthansa and SAS in 1987 in order to connect providers' content with travel agencies and consumers in real time. The creation of Amadeus was intended to offer a European alternative to Sabre, the American GDS. The first Amadeus system was built from core reservation system code coming from System One, an American GDS that competed with Sabre but went bankrupt, and a copy of the Air France pricing engine. These systems were respectively running under IBM TPF and Unisys. At the beginning of Amadeus, the Amadeus systems were functionally dedicated to airline reservation and centered on the PNR (Passenger Name Record), the passenger's travel file. Throughout the years, the PNR was opened up to additional travel industries (hotels, rail, cars, cruises, ferries, insurance, etc.).
Although established initially as a private partnership, Amadeus went public in October 1999, becoming listed on the Paris, Frankfurt and Madrid stock exchanges. Progressively and in line with industry evolution, Amadeus diversified its operations by focusing on information technologies (IT) to deliver services spanning beyond sales and reservation functionalities, centred on streamlining the operational and distribution requirements of its customer base.
In 2000, Amadeus received an ISO 9001:2000 quality certification – the first GDS company to do so. Since 2004, the company has invested €1 billion in R&D and Amadeus's technology has increasingly embraced open systems which provide clients with more flexibility and features, as well as other benefits. Today, 85% of its software portfolio is open system based. In 2005, Amadeus was delisted from the Paris, Frankfurt and Madrid stock exchanges when BC Partners and Cinven bought their stake from three of the four founding airlines and the rest of the capital floated from institutional and minority shareholders. The transition from distribution system to technology provider was reflected by the change in its corporate name in 2006, when the company name was changed to Amadeus IT Group. In 2009, Amadeus invested about €257 million in R&D. Amadeus is again listed on the Spanish Stock Exchanges as of 29 April 2010 (AMS). Throughout the years, Amadeus acquired:
- SMART AB, the leading travel distribution company in Northern Europe
- Vacation.com, the largest US marketing network for leisure travel
- E-Travel, Inc., a leading supplier of hosted technology products for corporate travel
- Opodo, a European travel website which it sold on February 2011 for €450 million
- Airline Automation (AAI), a robotic PNR processing company, in 2006
- TravelTainment, a leisure content provider
- Optims, a European hotel software company
- Onerail, a rail IT software supplier
Read more about this topic: Amadeus IT Group
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