Air Canada is to implement the Amadeus Altéa Suite passenger service system as well as other Amadeus IT solutions including Anytime Merchandising, preparing it for IATA’s new distribution capability.

Duncan Bureau, vice president, global sales, Air Canada says the selection of Altéa is to support the airline’s strategic plans for growth, including new routes.

“Air Canada has been growing significantly over the last five years. That has triggered a need to have a look at our PSS system, which was historical legacy system.

“We spent a lot of time looking at our options. We felt that Amadeus was very well aligned with our strategy going forward.

“Today, we carry 45 million passengers. We expect to carry 50 million by 2020 and be in the top 10 airlines in the world. We needed to find a distribution partner and a PSS that would enable that.”

The decision was also driven by the fact that the majority of Star Alliance member airlines use Altéa, Bureau says:

“That allows us to seamlessly talk and manage PNRs across Star Alliance. The strategy for us is, as we continue to grow our network, and as we look to improve the merchandising capabilities of Air Canada, to ensure that we offer the right product to the right customer at the right time.

Ilya Kostov, senior vice president and chief commercial officer, airlines, Amadeus North America adds:

“Because it is a common platform—used by the majority of Star Alliance carriers – in the event of a disruption, the passenger name record or the passenger reservation is the same chaired reservation across all players. When anyone of those players make a change to re-accommodate the passenger, it is seamlessly propagated to all of the other airline partners and the travel advisor.

Air Canada believes that Altéa will also allow it to improve its merchandising of ancillary products and services by agents as well as on its own homepage, Bureau explains:

 “Ancillary revenue is important. But more important is to get the right product in front of the right customer, and that those product attributes that are important customer through the Altea environment can be acquired with the seat.

“The first thing is that Air Canada has partnered with Amadeus for our consumer website. That has been underway for quite some time. There are multiple touch-points all powered by Amadeus. The guest experience should look the same on our website, regardless of point of sale. We’re looking at also launching our small/medium enterprise booking engine as well, again powered by Amadeus.

“For us, it’s about having a very user-friendly GUI that allows consumers to make choices and merchandises our content in a way that we can communicate the value attribute of every different fare level..and why it would be important to move from a Tango to a Flex to a Latitude depending on what type of customer you are.

The airline will also adopt Amadeus’ Customer Experience Management, Payments, Revenue Integrity, Group Management and Passenger Recovery.