Amadeus, a leading travel technology partner and transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry and airberlin, Germany’s second largest airline, have inked a multiyear IT contract to implement the full suite of Amadeus Altea, the company’s Customer Management System. The German hybrid carrier will see its reservations, inventory management and departure control operations migrated to Amadeus’ new generation Altea portfolio in the spring of 2012.

airberlin will become the newest partner in the oneworld Alliance when it joins as foreseen in early 2012 and Altea’s ability to enable seamless sharing of information with full service partners is a primary driver for  airberlin’s IT transformation. The carrier will also benefit from a fully integrated system ensuring consistency across its multiple sales channels.

Every year, airberlin carries more than 33 million passengers. Tickets are sold directly via the airline’s website and service centre as well as in-directly through travel agencies and tour operators. The carrier already benefits from the Reservation and Inventory modules of Altea to manage a portion of its bookings generated by GDS distribution to travel agencies. Under the terms of the new deal use of Altea will expand to cover the airline’s entire business.

Christoph Debus, airberlin COO said: “Our planned migration to Altea is an important step in providing and further enhancing our award winning service to our customers and better integration with our partner airlines - which are both essential to our hybrid business model.” He continued: “Nine of the twelve oneworld carriers already use the Altea platform so we are confident of the efficiency advantages Altea will deliver whilst allowing us to rapidly implement technical links that will increase our revenue generating potential.”

Julia Sattel, Vice President Airline IT, Amadeus commented: “airberlin is the first major hybrid carrier to sign up to the full Altea suite and we are delighted to be working with them to consolidate their IT systems. We see an increasing number of airlines adopting a hybrid market position and to take full advantage many are considering the positive impact a flexible and function-rich IT infrastructure can deliver.”

There are now 112 airlines contracted for Altea, with 97 having been migrated. During the first quarter of 2011 Amadeus’ Altea system processed 94 million ‘Passengers Boarded’, 38.8% more than a year ago.