Amadeus has launched a new middle-man service called Amadeus Meta Pricer to help airline websites cope with the strain of travel search engines. The company, based in Madrid, includes shareholders Air France, Iberia and Lufthansa.
Currently travel search engines use a screen-scraping technique to retrieve information from airline websites so that customers can search from numerous airlines with one search. This system affects the efficiency of both the airline and the search engine as it not only weakens the performance of the airline website and adds extra costs, but it also means inaccuracies for the search engine.
The new system introduced by Amadeus will make the process more efficient for both sides: airlines will inform Amadeus of the services they wish to make available to their selected travel search engines, and in turn the search engines will have to retrieve this information from Amadeus.