April 03, 2009

                                                                                   Ankur Bhatia, Managing Director, Amadeus India and Executive Director of Bird Group

Ankur Bhatia, Managing Director, Amadeus India and Executive Director of Bird Group is the driving force behind Amadeus India that has today grown into a leading Global Distributions Systems (GDS) in the subcontinent with a market share of over 50 percent. He provides strategic vision and direction to the consortia of the Bird Group of Companies. He single handedly manages the diversification charter at the group, which today is a business conglomerate with a turnover in excess of USD 100 million. He holds a degree in computer science from King’s college, University of London.

Ankur Bhatia, Managing Director, Amadeus India and Executive Director of Bird Group, speaks to ACEXC.

“One of the biggest opportunities in the Indian travel market is clearly that of online travel. Online travel is soon expected to be a $ 2 billion Industry. Travel is the largest e- commerce vertical in India with more than 17% of all flight tickets booked in India being done via travel portals.” Ankur Bhatia, Managing Director, Amadeus India

ACEXC: What are the products offered by Amadeus India? How does it impact the costs and efficiency of the industry?

Ankur Bhatia: Amadeus provides a comprehensive technology offering to the travel & tourism industry.  This end-to-end offering combines technology in distribution, IT, point of sale solutions and more, helping our customers to take advantage of the technology and leverage it to their advantage. The Amadeus empowers Airlines (network airlines, regional airlines, and low cost/leisure carriers), Hotels (chains, representation companies, and independent hotel companies), Ground & Maritime (car rental companies, railway companies, ferry lines, cruise lines and insurance companies) and Tour operators (specialty, mass-market and vertically-integrated tour operators). The travel sellers include the Travel agencies, including travel management companies, business and leisure agencies, online travel agencies and consolidators. Amadeus is also offering a state -of –the art low fare search tool called Master Pricer offering best 200 fares arranged from lowest to highest. This has helped Online Travel Agents (OLTAs) price complex itineraries involving multiple carriers in a single system transaction.

And the buyers of these travel services include Corporations (self-booking solutions for companies looking to maximise value from their travel spend) and end-travellers.

Amadeus India will very soon have services for railway industry. The launch of new routes is also increasingly being seen as a suitable travel alternative to air, as well as complementary to air travel in transporting traffic to and from airports.

Amadeus is widely regarded as the leader, driving the industry to greater heights by providing faster, easily accessible and cost-saving technologies. Based on open standards, every Amadeus technological solution is designed for the full and seamless integration demanded by today’s networked world.

As far as distribution is concerned Amadeus software is installed free of cost to travel agencies. Our clients, the airline, hotel and other industry players pay us in the same manner as most distributors.

Amadeus products give fast and easy access to:

·  Amadeus database of over 500 airline inventories                                                    (representing more than 95% of the   world's scheduled airline seats)

·  Hotel chains (representing more than 53,000 hotel properties)

·  48 car rental companies (serving 24,000 locations)

·  Other travel providers such as ferry, rail, cruise, insurance and tour operators

Amadeus technology also helps provide IT solutions like inventory management, revenue management, departure control, e-ticket servers etc to the industry and these are charged on a turnkey basis. While we cannot disclose Amadeus’ profit margins it is important to note that a significant amount of these get reinvested into R&D to ensure that cutting edge technology is always available and ready to help the industry work faster and deliver more at lower costs. 

ACEXC: What are the opportunities and challenges you see in the Indian travel industry?

Ankur Bhatia: One of the biggest opportunities in the Indian travel market is clearly that of online travel. Online travel is soon expected to be a $ 2 billion Industry. Travel is the largest e- commerce vertical in India with more than 17% of all flight tickets booked in India being done via travel portals.

ACEXC: Makemytrip.com has selected you as an exclusive technology partner to power all its online bookings. Can you please elaborate on Amadeus Web Services 2.0?

Ankur Bhatia: Amadeus will provide a global technology platform called Web services 2.0 to MakeMyTrip.com. They will now use Amadeus Web services for their Domestic Airline booking engine as well. They had been using the same technology platform on their International Engine for quite some time. Using a common technology platform, MakeMyTrip.com can offer world class standard of service for its users and increase its operational effectiveness resulting into savings in the long run. 

Web services are described as distributed services that are defined by uniform resource locators, whose interfaces and bindings can be defined, described and discovered by XML artifacts, and that support direct XML message-based interactions with other software applications via internet-based protocols. In terms of the technical benefits, there is no platform, language or framework dependency. Moreover, open standards are being used so no software has been deployed. There is no need to deliver a proxy for every platform. The most popular IDE integrated web services functionality (.net, eclipse) is being used. Therefore, new services will be immediately available and the customer doesn’t need to wait for the proxy to be deployed.

ACEXC: How does this partnership benefit MakeMyTrip’s customers?

Ankur Bhatia: The end user will benefit with a wider variety of fare availability coupled with swift response. MakeMyTrip.com also has the facility to develop hotel and car modules using Amadeus web services to enrich their database. This migration would ensure common technology platform for MakeMyTrip.com across the globe with faster response time for customers.

ACEXC: What is the impact of the current global economic crisis and slowing of Indian economy on the Indian travel industry?

Ankur Bhatia: Indeed, the travel and tourism sector is going through a very difficult period. We have seen a decline of around 8% in airline bookings in the month of February. March is witnessing reduction of 8 to 9% as well despite the discounts being offered by airlines. This has led to route rationalization as well as reduction in seats. The sentiment to travel and tourism seems to be severely affected these days and this is not likely to improve before the fourth quarter of this year. The impending elections will only add to the uncertainly in the environment thereby discouraging people to travel.

ACEXC: What are your plans for 2009?

Ankur Bhatia: With this partnership we have strengthened our position as the number one player in the online travel technology space. Going forward, we plan to offer more services and booking options to our customers. We plan to offer railway bookings on our platform very soon. We have seen a tremendous increase in online bookings for railways and this is expected to generate a sizeable amount of our revenues in the near future.

Amadeus India Private Limited, wholly owned by Bird Group, one of India’s largest travel conglomerates, has been a pioneer in providing a global platform to the Indian Travel industry by enabling access to state -of- the - art travel automation technology.

Set up in 1994, Amadeus India Private Limited was established with the objective of providing IT and software services, developing software products and automated tools, for the travel trade industry including customized software products for travel agents and travel service providers.

Amadeus India is a leading GDS in the subcontinent with a market share of over 50 percent. The company today has a 400 plus strong team of professionals across 30 Branch Offices catering to the needs of travel organizations in 135 cities spread across the length and width of India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Maldives.