Air France and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, one of the world’s largest airline groups flying more than 71 million passengers annually, and Amadeus announce the group’s successful migration to Amadeus’ Altea Inventory solution.

The migration sees the replacement of the two legacy systems that have served each airline for the last forty years and marks a major step in the group’s initiative to modernise and consolidate its Passenger Service System.

Fully integrated with Altea Reservation, the common airline group’s reservation system, Altea Inventory allows Air France-KLM to benefit from unique capabilities such as real-time seat availability across all direct and indirect channels including online distributors, and to take advantage of the most advanced revenue management techniques.

“This successful migration is a strategic step towards the transformation of our IT systems and the achievement of Air France-KLM synergies.” said Bruno Matheu, Air France-KLM eVP Marketing, Revenue-Management and Network. “Thanks to the flexibility of Altea Inventory, the Air France-KLM group has been able to migrate to a platform supporting the combined advanced needs of two major airlines whilst leveraging both carriers’ best practices”.

"The capability of Altea Inventory is a key building block towards the creation of a new generation revenue management system common to Air France and KLM that will allow global optimisation of our unique co-branded network”, added Pieter Bootsma, Air France-KLM Senior VP Revenue Management.

The project was a major undertaking over several years that delivered noteworthy improvements to the Amadeus platform such as availability cascading, full support of journey data and enhanced automated flight re-accommodation and schedule management. With nearly two million flights involved as part of the process and with more than fifty systems impacted, the migration was especially significant. Indeed, it required two critical system cutovers in only two weeks where Air France and its franchisee airlines (Regional, Brit Air, City Jet, VLM and CCM) plus KLM and its partner airlines (Kenya Airways and Martinair) were transitioned to the Amadeus platform.

“In a project of this magnitude, the collaboration between Air France, KLM and Amadeus was instrumental to ensuring a seamless project execution and a smooth operational start for the new platform” said Philippe CherIeque, Amadeus EVP, Commercial. “We are proud to have provided the necessary technology and skills to accommodate the combined complexity of such large airlines in a true partnership approach. Working with Air France and KLM was an enriching experience that pushed us to stay at the forefront of innovation and enabled the integration of interesting new features in the Altea suite”.

Air France-KLM will complement the adoption of the Altea suite with the upcoming integration of ticketing and departure control systems over the coming years, with the objective to further integrate both airlines’ critical operational processes and deliver long term competitive advantage.