Amadeus e-Travel Enables Airlines to Secure e-Commerce Record Revenues

In the first half of 2005, Airlines’ passenger bookings processed by e-Travel increased by 67% while hosting services exceeded 99.9% in reliability levels to ensure sustainable growth.

24 August 2005: Amadeus e-Travel, the global leader in online travel solutions and the e-commerce business unit of Amadeus, today announced record-breaking revenues and passenger bookings figures through e-Travel Planitgo, the most widely adopted e-commerce self-service solution. In the first half of 2005, airlines e-commerce passenger bookings processed by e-Travel increased by 67% over the same period last year. This represents an overall online booking value of more than 2 billion Euros in these 6 months. Amadeus e-Travel also continues to expand its presence in all regions of the globe.

This growth has been fuelled by the accelerated adoption of self-service through the websites of existing and new Amadeus e-Travel airlines customers worldwide. New e-Travel features to enhance end-users’ experiences, such as pre-sales merchandising or post-sales servicing online have also fostered conversion and retention rates respectively.

Another key growth factor is also the highly reliable e-Travel on-demand hosting solution to not only handle significant traffic volume, but also secure mission-critical growth in the long-term. This hosting service allows airlines to further offload their call centres and focus on their differentiated programs without having to worry about the availability and performance of their Web storefronts overtime.

In the first half of 2005, the reliability metrics of Amadeus e-Travel Planitgo servers for Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Americas exceeded 99.9%. This performance is the outcome of the e-Travel operational excellence program launched in June 2004 during the e-Travel Summit for Airlines, which also led to the replacement or upgrade of all e-commerce servers, a new shadow cluster infrastructure to allow nearly instantaneous fallbacks, hardware-based HTML compressors deployed across all servers, and the obtaining of TruSecure certificate from CyberTrust.

“This strategic ongoing operational excellence program drove us to design a significantly enhanced on-demand architecture for airlines, which can now scale up to any e-commerce traffic surges, in all regions, and for the years to come.” said Thomas Kiessling, Amadeus e-Commerce Operation Director. “e-Travel’s on-demand platform can serve potentially hundreds of airlines and enable them to outsource their entire personalised e-commerce store, including their user interface.”

Jérôme Destors, Amadeus e-Travel Commercial Director commented “Our significant investments to deliver reliable, flexible, innovative, and customisable on-demand e-commerce solutions are paying off. Our goal is to allow airlines to drastically increase their online sales revenues, while securing their investments overtime by delivering the best ‘Software As A Service’ offering for the future.”

Notes to Editors:

Amadeus e-Travel is the e-commerce business unit of Amadeus, a global leader in technology and distribution solutions for the travel and tourism industry. It provides e-commerce solutions to airlines, corporations, travel agencies and other online travel businesses, and is dedicated to its customers net success. e-Travel serves customers in 90 countries including corporations such as Airbus, DaimlerChrysler and Oracle Corporation, airlines and travel suppliers such as Air France, Iberia and Qantas, and online agencies such as Opodo.

For further information, please visit our Web site at www.e-travel.com.

Contact details:

Corporate & Marketing Communication

Amadeus

Tel : +34 91 582 0160

Fax : +34 91 582 0188

E-mail : [email protected]