Over the past decade, Amadeus has worked to evolve airport technology for a new generation of travelers and today we are celebrating a significant milestone on that journey. More than 100 airports around the world now connect to our Airport Cloud Use Service (ACUS), including those utilizing ACUS Mobile, providing more flexible, cost-effective, and sustainable IT infrastructure for passenger processing.
Over the past decade, Amadeus has worked to evolve airport technology for a new generation of travelers and today we are celebrating a significant milestone on that journey.
More than 100 airports around the world now connect to ourAirport Cloud Use Service (ACUS), including those utilizing ACUS Mobile, providing more flexible, cost-effective, and sustainable IT infrastructure for passenger processing.
FromHouston Airports
toCambodia’s three airports
, a growing number of terminals of all sizes are modernizing their common use infrastructure. ACUS is in operation across the globe - fromVancouver International Airport
in Canada, toCopenhagen Airportin Northern Europe andWellington
andChristchurch
airports in New Zealand. It has helped airports to retire energy-intensive servers and traditional workstations used for check-in and boarding.
Journey to today
To understand where we are, it can be enlightening to look at where it all started.
Before the migration to the cloud began, airports often relied on servers housed somewhere within terminals. This can be inefficient, as each airport has to maintain a specialized team of technicians, source power for server equipment locally, and keep systems up-to-date and up-and-running on-site.
This model for common use infrastructure was inflexible and energy intensive. For example, check-in desks were fixed in place. Not because they couldn’t theoretically be moved, but because they needed to be positioned next to the local network connection point. That meant passenger services were tied to fixed locations, limiting service innovation to fit the constraints of legacy technology.
This approach wasn’t only inflexible, it was costly too. Requiring legacy fixed network connections prior iterations of common use technology left airports facing an invoice where bespoke network connections often accounted for around half the cost of the infrastructure. ACUS changed this by enabling thin client devices to connect wirelessly to the Local Area Network or via mobile broadband, and ultimately, to the airline applications agents need when serving passengers.
A new world
Nearly ten years ago, we began working with airports to overcome these technical limitations by hosting airline systems used at the airport in the cloud.
In 2014, we dived into the topic in a paper called ‘It makes sense to share’ and many of the arguments made then remain valid today. Moving to cloud-based systems helps airports fulfill the potential of common-use service points, which can be used to serve any passenger, no matter which airline they fly with. Airports and airlines can become more flexible and are able to scale IT infrastructure up and down depending on the needs at that very moment.
This approach is also more sustainable by design. Computing tasks happen at energy-efficient data centers rather than local servers. Energy intensive workstations are replaced with thin-client devices agents use to access the cloud.
Innsbruck airport was the first airport to adopt Amadeus ACUS and recentlyexplored the impact it made. Today, the airport has been able to retire many on-site servers and costly fixed network connections for airlines in favor of redundant internet connectivity with ACUS.
With 100 airports operating their common use infrastructure in this way, the cloud has now proven its resilience. As seen atKeflavik
,Hamburg Airport
andPerth Airport
, when we reduce the complexity of infrastructure at the terminal, we can boost efficiency, drive resilience, and cut costs.
Improved experience
The traveler is central to everything we do at Amadeus, and moving to this new world of cloud-based solutions allows us to improve the services on offer. We want to enhance the passenger experience and create a seamless flow through the terminals, enabled by self-service and biometrics.JFK IAT , the operator of Terminal 4 at JFK Airport in New York and another ACUS customer is a great example of this: the deployment of Amadeus self-service check-in and bag drop allows passengers to drop their own bags in matter of seconds.
With the greater flexibility offered by ACUS Mobile, airport agents are now free to move about the airport, for example, checking in passengers wherever they are, rather than creating queues at desks. This new opportunity can also be used to upsell products to a passenger – creating new touch points where they may wish to look at fast-track security, duty-free, or even seat upgrades.
Additional IT flexibility means passenger service points can be placed where they best serve passenger needs, not where legacy technology requires them to be.
Off-airport check-in
This means facilities can even be located away from the airport, andoff-airport check-in is an area we expect to see grow in the coming years.
In Saudi Arabia, for example, our customerOACIS Middle East and Jeddah Management Company
, use Amadeus ACUS to provide check-in services outside Jeddah Airport at facilities across the country. Travelers could check-in at the hotel, receive luggage tags and boarding passes and hand over bags before they set off for the airport. The approach was used to serve more than 200,000 travelers during the hajj pilgrimage.
Flexibility for Lufthansa
Lufthansa has used ACUS Mobile for several years in a wide variety of ways to increase the flexibility of its operations and passenger services.
- During the COVID-19 pandemic the airline was tasked with repatriating thousands of German citizens from cruise ships in the Caribbean. Airports in location couldn’t effectively serve such large numbers of travelers in such a short space of time. SoLufthansa used ACUS Mobile
to check-in passengers as they disembarked multiple cruise ships.
- The airline has also used the technology to ensure service resilience across its network. When the IT systems at an important African airport ceased to function, Lufthansa was able to fly ACUS Mobile devices to the terminal and could continue to serve its customers as normal.
- The airline also uses the system in day-to-day operations to open new routes more quickly based on passenger demand. Rather than waiting months for its IT to be set-up at a new airport Lufthansa often chooses to begin services far more quickly with ACUS Mobile.
Having reached a milestone of 100 airports deploying this technology, we look forward to helping the industry discover new levels of flexibility that support entirely new passenger experiences.
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