American Airlines Taps Amadeus as Accounting System Partner

American Airlines plans to implement Amadeus’ cloud-based accounting system to track passenger sales.

Luis Maroto, CEO of Amadeus, made the announcement during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call Wednesday. “This will be our first standalone revenue accounting deployment and our first major IT project with a U.S. carrier,” Maroto said.  

Amadeus Is Branching Out Anew

The deal is an example of the ancillary businesses that Amadeus has been growing over the years, leading revenue to nearly fully recover to pre-pandemic levels in 2023.

The travel tech giant reported a total of €5.44 billion ($5.9 billion) in revenue for 2023, a 21% increase from the year prior. The total number in 2019 was €5.58 billion.

Amadeus’ primary business is serving as the world’s largest airline global distribution system, which provides data about flights to travel sellers, who then use that information to sell flights to consumers.

While those numbers are not fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels, Amadeus has other growing streams of revenue stemming from investments over the years that diversifyied its business.

Amadeus counted 450.2 million air bookings in 2023, an increase of 13.6% from 2022. That number in 2019 was 580.4 million. The lower number of bookings means revenue for that business is still about 475.5 million euros short of the €3.1 billion in 2019.

Growing Businesses  

Amadeus has been working to grow several of its non-distribution businesses, particularly the software it provides for airlines, hotels, and airports.  

Its “hospitality and other” software business, for example, has recovered and surpassed revenue of about €807 million in 2019 to €882.6 million in 2023. 

Maroto said during the earnings call that the company will soon start onboarding a “middle-sized sophisticated chain” as a new customer of its central reservation system, the product that hotels use to track inventory and rates. The company will share more information once it’s available, he said. 

Air IT Solutions revenue increased 21.6% in 2023 to €1.9 billion, surpassing the 2019 total of €1.8 billion. That category accounts for a number of software products that airlines can use to manage operations. 

Amadeus last year migrated the airlines Etihad, ITA, Hawaiian, and Allegiant to its own IT systems. It’s now working on completing migrations with All Nippon Airways and Vietnam Airlines.

Airline Retailing

Amadeus is also pushing clients to move to a new airline retailing system that leverages AI in partnership with Microsoft. The first customers piloting the new system are Saudia and Finnair. 

Meanwhile, Amadeus is planning to enhance its biometrics offerings following the acquisition of Vision-Box for $348 million.

“We feel Vision-Box is a very good company and a great opportunity in airports, but we also envision that biometrics can be used for other parts of our business,” Maroto said. “It could be for airlines, it could be in hotels — so we feel biometrics is going to represent much more than just on the airport field.”