Tourism Breaking News
flyadeal has taken another step to widen its distribution strategy by going live on the Amadeus booking platform giving travel agents access to the airline’s growing network of flights. Beginning with the domestic market – home to almost 4,000 travel agents accredited to the International Air Transport Association (IATA) – flyadeal will implement a phased rollout of the reservation tool to the trade in more countries over the next few months. When agents search for a particular route, the Amadeus GDS now displays flyadeal among the operating airlines. As a digital first airline, connecting with a global distribution system (GDS) is a significant strategic move since flyadeal launched its first flight in September 2017. flyadeal now operates over 200 daily scheduled services from bases in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam to more than 30 destinations across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and South Asia with a fleet of 42 Airbus A320 aircraft. Steven Greenway, flyadeal Chief Executive Officer, said: “Signing up with Amadeus is a historic step for flyadeal. GDS connection expands distribution of our inventory of flights and fares, and offers the wider travel agency community with instant access, convenience and booking capability through their desktop terminals.
“Having scaled our operations over the years, building a strong domestic network of flights and increasingly moving into international operations, our business has evolved into more partnerships, including travel agencies which we see as a vital part of our growth story to complement our own direct booking channels.”
Rogier van Enk, flyadeal Chief Commercial and Customer Experience Officer, added: “As we start off in our home market of Saudi Arabia, the Amadeus booking tool will be rolled out to other international markets that we fly to and those that we don’t over the next few months.
“With flyadeal planning a pipeline of interline and codeshare agreements with other airlines over the next 12 months, GDS access plays an even more important commercial role to distribute our portfolio of products enabling travel agents to better serve their customers – our passengers.”
Low-cost airlines typically sell seats through their dedicated booking channels such as websites, mobile Apps and call centres. Over the past two years flyadeal has built internal capability by increasingly giving travel agents direct access to the airline’s website, but the GDS route is more comprehensive with potential global reach to tens of thousands of IATA-accredited agents.
Earlier this year, flyadeal joined the airline industry body IATA which has over 60,000 accredited travel agencies worldwide – the target audience that flyadeal is eventually aiming at. With agents automatically being members of IATA’s Billing and Settlement Plan, this also ensures a robust payment processing mechanism for airlines.
