Amadeus was once the European Answer to Sabre in the GDS Airline industry
“Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.” These were the words of George S. Patton and his take on what history should serve to us in the present day in our foreseeing of the future. In 1987, Amadeus IT Group, one of the largest GDS systems in the world was born through an initiative done by four major airlines at the time: Lufthansa, SAS, Iberia and Air France. The efforts were made for the creation of what later on shook the airline ticketing industry and became known as Airline IT provider. Today, almost no one books an airline, a hotel, or even other forms of transport without passing by this meticulous system.
But, the true question is why would 4 national carriers of 4 European countries decide to create such an important company? Well, other than the evident cost-cutting and profit-making potential for each airline within Europe, the airline IT companies relied heavily on databases that stored personal information of passengers which could have been seen as a national threat outside European grounds. The possibility to have such a unanimous solution created on European soil would not have barred fruit had it not been for the common European trading zone that connected all four major economies.
Today, the Amadeus IT Group which has become an independent Spanish company that is publicly traded, serves as a reminder for European policymakers, entrepreneurs, and growing tech companies in Paris, Berlin, Barcelona and Stockholm that maybe e-commerce platforms need to merge to create a proper independent e-commerce company that manages to compete with companies like Amazon, a company that has had a free pass in Europe, headquartering its European base in Dublin. And maybe Europe must not only impose protective European internet privacy laws known as GDPR, but also go to the Chinese extent of creating European alternatives. The alternative services might seem like a remote option but even Sabre and Amadeus eventually learned how to interact with one another and so this should eventually be a possibility.
Given that Europe possesses such rich previous case studies on maneuvering privacy issues and creating internal solutions that retain profits within the aged continent, I cannot help but think ‘is Europe acting too late and using the wrong solution of penalizing’?
Main photo:Photo by James Yarema on Unsplash
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