So hello, everyone. Thanks for being here. Thanks to the people also connected via the web. I see many familiar faces, and on behalf of my team, which is here on the first row, a big welcome to this event, where, as Cristina explained, we plan to present to you our strategy and how our business is evolving since the last time that we met. If we see, the last time we were here, and we had an Investor Day, was 2016. Then we had a Tech Day in 2017, but we haven't had the opportunity to really be together and explain in detail our business. But I believe since then, the company has evolved a lot. We have been executing our strategy, and I believe we are a stronger company than pre-COVID.
Of course, we had COVID in the middle. COVID impacted our capability to grow. We had continuously been growing up to 2019 and started very well. 2020, and then, of course, we all know what happened with COVID. But I believe we are today a stronger company. We are more diversified from a geography and from a business point of view. Of course, we had to learn how to deal with the situation of COVID, as the company has been always in a growing mode, and we had to adjust to that situation. And today, I believe we are really the technology company and the reference of the technology company in the travel industry. And this is really what we are.
We are at the crossroad of travel and technology, as you know, two sectors and two industries that are growing. I mean, you know how travel has recovered since the pandemic, and the projection of WTTC is that travel will be 11.6% of the global GDP in 2033, versus 9.1% that we are mainly today. That means that travel will keep growing faster than the overall economy. What we know about travel, travel is a complex industry. We are talking about moving people around. What we know about travel is that things are evolving, are changing all the time. We have more players today, we have more demands from the traveler, more personalization is needed, and for that, we have the technology.
Travel has been an industry that has required technology for a long time. If you see the origin of Amadeus, this is why at that moment, the technology was needed to really optimize the way we were distributing our content. This has been there for the last 35 years, since the origin of Amadeus. We see at the times of internet, how this industry was very quickly in embracing, you know, direct sales, the digital matters, big online travel agencies were created. Today, again, we continuously see the role of technology as an important matter for travel. The estimation of Gartner is that this represents around EUR 90 billion in total. We have made an estimation, and you will see the details later, of around EUR 40 billion ourselves.
This is based on the products and solutions that we have today, and that we have in our roadmap for the next 3 years. Of course, this is not the end. We expect in the future to keep enlarging our addressable market, keep enlarging our solutions, and keep addressing much more than this EUR 40 billion in the medium term. The evolution of the company and the ambition has been always to expand our touchpoints. From the origin of the company, enlarging into more touchpoints of the travel industry. Today, we are present from the inspiration phase until, you know, the border controls, trip, and post-trip. And this has allowed us to really cover and have business with more verticals.
One of the objectives is to provide product and solutions to travel agencies, to airlines, full-service carriers, low-cost carriers, corporations, hotels, airports, and so on and so forth. Of course, we do that in a way that we try to optimize the synergies between the businesses. I mean, the last acquisition we did, well, the previous one, because we did also Voxel, but if we talk about Vision-Box, of course, we are buying the company because we believe biometrics is important, and they have a big business in airports and border control. But of course, part of the logic is that we expect to apply that to more verticals, could be airlines, could be hotels in the future. That's part of the logic of everything we do. And on top of that, we try to connect the different elements and the different providers.
We believe there is clearly a value to the traveler of having businesses that can really connect the different providers, and being ourselves in the middle. Of course, distribution was since the origin, that logic. You have different providers that were part of the same, of the same logic, of the same business. We are doing that today with Payments, we are investing in BI, and we will keep trying to really see how we can optimize and connect better, playing that role in the middle and benefiting from the growth that is coming in the travel industry. Of course, technology. I mentioned already technology. Technology is fundamental to everything we do. It's part of our DNA, and it's important to really keep executing our strategy. Sylvain will elaborate on that.
Of course, you know, we are going through a big project of a cloud migration as we speak, but we are also testing any technology. Of course, everybody's talking about now GenAI, any technology that can really bring us value in the way we approach our, our customers. And what is extremely important is to bring innovation. I believe as a company, we have proven our capability to bring new ideas to the industry, bring innovation. This is a must for us. I mean, well, whatever we have today in the market is not enough. We need to keep evolving, and you have here some examples of things that we are doing today. And again, this will be further elaborated in the presentations later. But Nevio and vNext.
vNext is a similar concept than Nevio for Navitaire, for our low-cost carriers. What we are doing, in my view, is going to be leading the path in the industry. What we are doing with NDC and all the investments, again, our belief is that, the technology that we are implementing and we are completing is going to really be leading in the industry. ACRS, as you know, we started many years ago, but the proof point is taking time. It's part of our logic, part of our model, but the proof point of having already three of the big chains and what we are developing, in my view, is unique, and I'm pretty optimistic about the traction and getting more customers into that.
Payments with all the innovation and all the new ideas that we are bringing to the table. And there are different ways we are bringing this innovation. On the one hand, it's organically with our investment that we do on an ongoing basis. Even we have created, under our strategic group, a unit called Next Wave, that is thinking about Horizon three, things that will generate revenues in the medium term. That's one important part of the puzzle of how to bring innovation. Second, of course, is M&A. As we have explained, the acquisitions are accelerating our go-to- market and are bringing innovation, and the last two acquisitions, one in payment and one in biometrics, are a proof of that. And finally, partnership.
We are evolving our technology to be more open and to be easier to work with different partners. The biggest agreement we have is with Microsoft as part of our cloud agreement. We are working together in innovation. One of them has to do with what is called Cytric Easy, a solution for corporates that is fully integrated into Teams today. But we have agreements with IBM, with Accenture, with Tata Group, with Adobe, and many, many partners. So the partnership is going to be part of the strategy of the company more and more, and it has two big advantages. One, of course, is the solutions we provide to the customers that will be more complete, as we are able to provide things that today are not in our portfolio.
And then, of course, the flexibility and the stickiness that it gives to customers to work with different companies in the way we are operating that will generate incremental value. I mean, as you know, our objective is to be leaders in the different areas in which we operate, and this requires investments. Without investment, we cannot do that. And you know how the model works. I mean, we make bets, and ACRS is a good example of working with one customer. And of course, this is not profitable if we are not able to really get an industry solution that will bring economies of scale and the margins that are required. Therefore, at the end of the period, if we do the right things, the volume will come, the profits will come, and the traction will be there.
But this clearly requires investment, and there is always a gap between the investment and the return of the business. I mean, one example is, is Marriott or now Accor. I mean, we signed Marriott and of course, up to today, no impact in the P&L. I mean, the impact will come later, but we are already... Well, I would say the, the, the impact is negative until you start getting the traction and you start getting the transactions. At the end, as you know, the majority of our business is, is transaction based, is extremely recurring, is quite resilient. But that means that on an ongoing basis, if we want to really have revenues and growth in the medium term, we need to keep investing in R&D. Can we cut this amount?
Of course, if we will reduce the investment, I will say not many things will happen in 2024, and probably not in 2025. But our capability to keep growing in 2027, 2028, which is our objective, will not be easy, will not be there. And this is why even as you see, has been quite consistent, with exception of the years of COVID, but even there, I mean, we had to adapt, of course, due to the situation of the company and the cost position. But we were not. We were maintaining all the commitments we had with customers. We were maintaining the key projects, I mean, things like NDC, the investment in ACRS, all that was kept.
So we decided to really keep things that were not nice to have, but really important for our future. In my view, this has been one of the reasons why, after COVID, we have been able to really create a gap with some of the companies that are players and are playing in our industry. Finally, for this first section, I would like to talk to you about what I consider could be our strengths as a company. The first one is the years of expertise. We have been working more than 35 years in the travel industry.
I will say, I mean, somehow even more, because in, at the origin of the company, there were many people coming from the airlines at that point that had a lot of experience in how to develop solutions for, for airlines. And this is giving us a very strong position of how, the trends are happening in the industry, how things are evolving, and to really anticipate, how to address these needs, in the travel industry. Of course, for any B2B company, to have a strong, customer proximity is fundamental.
In my view, with the spread that we have worldwide, we are present in 195 countries, so mainly in the majority of the countries around the world, with the people that are very close to the customer, this customer centricity is fundamental. It creates a stickiness, it creates relationship with the customer, and of course, it also brings ideas of how things are evolving for us to be able to really to really solve and to really provide that.... Our technological capabilities are proven. I mean, we are talking about very complex projects.
The migrations we do of big carriers, the migrations we do of big hotels that we are doing today, some of the projects that we have that we are addressing are very, very complex, and we do that seamless and without any disruption, which is not easy. I mean, you know, the worst days that I have and the most complex matter is when the system is down, when there is a disruption in the airport, when people cannot travel, or they are arriving late for business, for leisure.
This is really messy, and we are talking about a complex industry that has to move people, and for us, it's fundamental when we address these big projects that the traveler doesn't suffer whatever happens in the migration of these big systems to us. So for us, in my view, we are having a very, very good track record. Again, I mentioned already about the investments, but in general, of course, there are some things that have not worked as we expected, but in the majority of the cases, our track record has been very positive, in some cases taking more time than we wanted. And yes, there are some areas where we have tried and the results have not been as we expected.
But in general, our ability to get ideas, innovate, and bring to the market and get revenue is there. We have a long-term focus. I mentioned already about that. I mean, the discussion we are having very often, of course, we track what is going on in the year, but our capability to influence what happens in 2024 and 2025, I will say, is quite limited. Of course, whatever happens in the industry with traffic with the economy may have an impact, and we can adapt to that. But the majority of the contracts that we sign are not going to have an impact in the short term.
Of course, it is our goal to keep signing, to keep enlarging our portfolio of solutions to our customers, to really have a growth that is going above the outlook that we give to you today. I mean, mainly, we are thinking about the medium term and how we keep the company growing at the same level or more in the medium term. Finally, the talent. I mean, this is a company that has been successful. We have been able to attract good people. Hopefully, you will see many of them today. But at all levels of the company, talent has been a focus in the organization.
I strongly believe we have very, very good people in the company, and this should give us comfort, not just about today, but about the future. In my view, this was proven during the times of COVID, how the organization was able to react and adapt. Of course, it was not just me and the management team, but it was the whole organization maintaining the focus and the delivery of the customers. So with that, I'm hand over to Sylvain to elaborate more on the technology piece.
Good morning. My name is Sylvain Roy. I am Chief Technology Officer at Amadeus. So Luis shared about our vision for the travel industry, of a more connected and personalized traveler experience. We're now going to explain how Amadeus technology will enable this vision and why we are uniquely positioned to deliver on that. So my excited, exciting mission at Amadeus is to ensure that we have access to all the technological capabilities and assets needed to deliver on the expectation of our customers and on our vision, what Luis described. Well, as said by Luis, I mean, the world, the world is evolving, and travel is evolving faster and faster. And for us, from a technology perspective, it really means two things. The first one is the speed of technology. It moves faster, and it requires a constant monitoring from us.
The second one is this ever-increasing expectation of the traveler in term of digitalization and personalization. So this is our focus, too. But before to start, I would like... Before to share about our strategy, I'd like to tell you where we are today. So we are a global IT provider in the travel industry. We provide mission-critical application to most of the big players out there, airlines, airports. We cover the entire traveler journey. So as stated by Luis, the stability, the availability of our system is actually absolutely crucial for our customer. And we have a platform which allow us to develop application with this level of stability, scalability, while still evolving the system at the same time. And I'd like to give you some sense of the size of this platform.
So every single second, we receive 100,000 transactions in the system from our customers. It is as much as Google Search. We operate, we manage 43 PB of data. This is close to what Netflix is doing. And then we do two things in parallel, which are in contradiction. The first one, we have 10,000+ engineers worldwide, pushing, on average, 1,500 changes to the system every single day. And on the other side, well, we provide this system on a 24/7 basis to our customers with an availability of 99.99%. So it's a bit like, you know, changing the tire of a car on a German autobahn without stopping, okay? We're evolving while moving.
So as stated by Luis, we are at the center of the travel industry, and as such, we aim to power the largest, most vibrant, sustainable ecosystem of open, connected, and flexible travel solutions. This is ambitious. There is no question about that. It requires a lot from our technology, our platform, and our applications. So this brings me to my agenda for the rest of this presentation. I will be talking about our move to the cloud. Luis referred to it, how we're doing that with Microsoft, how at the same time we are embracing a new cloud-native architecture. How we're leveraging data, AI, for a new generation of product, and how we're opening the system, bringing self-service ability for the speed and agility of our customers. And then the enablers.
To do that, we need a responsible and efficient developer environment, we need security by design, and we need to rely on the right technologies. So I will touch on each of those points. Our move to the cloud is the biggest program in the company as we speak. I mean, the public cloud, from a technology perspective, is where most of the innovation happens now. So obviously, we want to be there, to be in a position to leverage this innovation. But obviously, we expect multiple benefit from it. It's about, remember those big words, I mean, stability, scalability, resiliency of the system. Well, that's number one. In the cloud, we expect to go to the next level. Why? Because we're moving from one data center in one location to multiple data centers in multiple location. Our system will be more robust.
The second aspect is about this visibility and this control it will give us on our cost. We will be able to scale up and down based on our needs. The third one is, thanks to the global footprint of the public cloud providers, we will be able to deploy our software anywhere in the world, which means close to our customers, either for response time reason or for local regulation reason. We are doing this migration, this move to the cloud, with Microsoft. They are our partner. This is a very strong partnership, extremely beneficial to us. It gives us access to their expert, to their advanced tooling, and to their technology. How are we doing? Well, we aim to complete the program in the first half of 2026, as planned, and the most of the migration will be done by 2025.
As we speak today, every single application in the Amadeus system is engaged in the overall migration process. For everything new, we do it directly in the cloud, with the cloud-native architecture. So I'm thinking about Nevio, our new gen PSS, which is directly implemented in the cloud with this new cloud-native architecture, which I will describe in a couple of slides. It's the same thing for ACRS, our reservation, our hospitality reservation system. Outpayce, our Cytric Easy, our corporate booking tools. I mean, all those solutions are built from the beginning with a cloud-native architecture. Well, I think it's important to keep in mind that this is an important, a massive program for us, a multi-year program, but this isn't the first time that we have done that, and Luis referred to our capability to deliver on this massive program.
I'm thinking about the move that we've done out of TPF mainframe to a Linux distributed system. Well, this was the previous massive technology program that we've done. This is a bit of a continuation, and that's what we do to ensure that we are where we need to be in terms of technology. Now, it is very important to understand that this program, this move to the cloud, is not merely lifting and shifting applications to the public cloud. It is a fine balance between the speed of the migration and the transformation required to capture all the benefits of the cloud. So to achieve that, we are doing a number of transformations at the same time, and I'd like to mention two of those transformations that we are doing at the same time we are moving to the cloud.
The first one is about this cloud-native architecture that we are putting in place. If I can use a metaphor, the cars that you use in your day-to-day life is not the cars that you want to use for a Formula One Grand Prix, okay? Well, the cloud-native architecture, it's a framework. So this framework is the car that we give to our developers and application to fully leverage the public cloud. So what does it bring, this car? What are the features? Well, it comes with a better elasticity. It can dynamically scale up and down based on our needs. It comes with a full access to cloud-managed services.
I told before about innovation and the fact that lots of the innovation in the IT world happens in the public cloud now. Well, it happens in the form of managed services. With this new car, our developers, our applications, have full access to those managed services, and then full access to the innovation that we can find in the cloud. Then a higher level of reliability, obviously, something that we expect from the car. But, I mean, with the Formula One car, there is one thing that you can do for sure, it's to drive faster. Frankly, this cloud-native architecture is a lot about that. We want to drive faster in the sense that we want to have a quicker, a faster iteration process. It's all about innovation. We want to have a lower time to market. Our developments needs to go in production faster.
We also want to be faster in the sense that the ramp-up of our people when they use the technology, needs to be faster and more efficient. So as you can see, it's, it's a lot about speed. Now, there is another transformation that we are doing as we're moving to the cloud, and it is the introduction of an event-driven architecture. Today, Amadeus is a service, as a very robust service-oriented architecture with thousands and thousands of microservices, while we are complementing that with this event-driven architecture to bring a new way for our application to interact. To go back to the business requirement behind it, okay, what are we trying to do? Well, remember, the Amadeus mission: to make travel better everywhere for everyone. Well, that's all about that.
It's about putting the, the customer, the traveler, at the center of what we do, to be able to monitor, to receive events on the entire traveler journey. We don't want to know only about your checking or your boarding. We want to know about your checking, your boarding, the fact that you might end up being disrupted in an airport in the middle of the night, and we want to be able to react to that.... So we want to receive all the events associated to the traveler, to be able to build applications that leverage those events and proactively, in real time, support the traveler in his overall travel. So this is exactly what we are achieving with this new architecture. Now, I talk about our application, okay? They can interact with services. That's our service-oriented architecture. They can, on top, exchange events. But that's not all.
The next thing that we can do is about data. We have, remember, a fair amount of data. We're talking about 43 PB of data, and we do leverage it already, okay? I'm thinking about our, hospitality business intelligence product, our payment fraud detection solution. I mean, those are applications that rely on the data we have to generate value. The next thing that you do when you have data is you plug artificial intelligence on top of it to extract even more insight. And that we do it at scale, okay? All over the place in the organization. We do it in our flight management product to optimize fuel consumption . We do it to minimize the impact of disruption for our customers. We do it to provide better shopping solutions to people doing their shopping, looking for a travel solution.
We do it on hospitality side to provide better hotel occupancy forecasting. So that's the next thing we do. Okay, the question is then, what do we do next, sorry, in terms of data? So the next thing that we want to do in terms of data is to go across vertical. We have data all over the place, but as you've seen, all the examples that I gave are pretty much in one vertical. It's about one application, generating data and then extracting insight about those data. Well, that we want to do it at scale across all the verticals of the organization. What does it take to do that? Well, it takes two things. The first one is, again, a technical platform, and that is a platform that we are building in the cloud.
We call it a data mesh, and it complements the event mesh and the service mesh that I've described before. The second part is that we need to become a data-centric organization, because data needs to be at the center of what we do. It's about having everything it takes to be agile, to use data, but also to be responsible. We want to use data in a responsible manner. So I talked about AI just before, and about the fact that we use it all over the place, but in 2017, you know, Google introduced this scientific paper, you might have heard about it, which is called—which was called Attention Is All You Need. And this paper introduced something called the Transformer, which is a very special topology of neural network. And this is what we call now GenAI, okay?
That does change pretty much everything in terms of AI. Pretty much every innovation after that is based on the Transformer. So we're talking about GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT from OpenAI or Google Gemini. They're all based on the Transformer. This is probably going to change the world, and this means something for Amadeus. So how do we see that? Well, we see it with two dimensions. The first dimension is what it brings to our product, how we can make our product better, how we can come up with new products. The second dimension is how we can use this technology internally to be more efficient. So when it comes to our product, we have more than 70 initiatives today in the organization to embed generative AI or to use generative AI in new products.
I'd like to give you three example. The first one is about content generation. You know, the generative AI is about the fact that it can generate content. Well, we use that for airline website to improve the overall inspiration process for our customers, with images, text, all generated by AI. The second one is actually a category of things that we are doing, and I call that digital assistance. It's all the products that we are complementing with a digital assistant. Our product are complex because they solve complex problem. If you can have a digital assistant helping you, helping the user to understand how to use the product, to have this assistant support him, to give him insight about past result, past data, and how to achieve what the users want to do, we make our product better.
And that we do for a number of our product. I'm thinking in particular about our revenue management solution. And the third category is... GenAI is also kind of a new channel. It's a conversational channel. You can have a conversation with a GenAI chatbot, which is much better than what we've seen before. And that also we use, and I think the best example is our corporate booking tool, Cytric Easy, which is actually the integration of a chatbot based on GenAI in Microsoft Teams for the corporate traveler. So as a corporate traveler, I can book in my preferred interface, which is Microsoft Teams, interfacing with a travel agent, which is actually a GenAI behind the scene, in a very, very natural manner. So clearly, GenAI will have an impact, and we are doing everything it takes in Amadeus to use it on our products.
Now, internally, what does it mean? I mean, internally, we have already today deployed GitHub Copilot, which help our developers to produce software faster and better, and Office Copilot across the entire organization for all our developers. We're also developing, deploying our own solution. I'm thinking about large language models that we've put in place to get access, to our staff, to all our knowledge base in a very natural manner. We have other example. For example, for testing and so on, we are using the technologies in a number of places to get more efficiencies in the organization. Now I want to talk about openness and self-serviceability. What we are doing here, and this is not a new trend, this is something that we started years ago, but this is important because what we are doing here is that we are opening our system.
Remember, I said that our system, our application, they can interact with services, they can exchange events, they can exchange data, they can use AI. I mean, all those capabilities we want to give to open that to our customers. So it really means to give access to the underlying capabilities of our system to our customers, partners, for them to be able to build the solution they need. And on top of it, we make it self-serviceable, which means that there is no intermediary. They got access directly to those capabilities, and this is all about giving them speed and agility in what they are doing. So now, all those, this cluster of technology, okay, cloud native, AI, data, events, services, openness, and self-serviceability, we call this cluster the Aviation Platform .
And it is really a layer on top of everything we do, which opens the system to customers, partners, services integrators, startups, to leverage all our assets and build the solutions they need with all the customizations they want. So, so far, I talk about all the transformations that we are bringing to our system, the platforms that we are building, but obviously, there are a few enablers. So first, I want to talk about the efficient and responsible development environment that we've put in place, okay? We're only going to be successful with what I've described if we are successful in the execution, and that does require this efficient development environment. Efficient means that we want it to be fast with the right quality. We target zero defect in production, and our developers should be able to deploy their software in no time in production.
That really, really takes a number of things, okay? So I could mention the fact that we are integrating new programming languages, that we are getting access to more advanced tooling, in particular, thanks to Microsoft. That we are building much more automation than before. I mean, the amount of automation supporting the developer in his day-to-day work is a lot more than what it was a few years ago. And with the move to the cloud, we go even further. And the last one, leveraging AI, okay? Our developer now have access to GitHub Copilot to help them develop software. We're using the same thing for testing. We're using the same thing to operate our software. The other aspect is responsible. What does it mean to have a responsible development environment?
Well, as a company, we are committed to sustainability, and when it comes to IT, it means, in particular, carbon emission. So we have introduced a carbon calculator, which allows our developer, our architect, to assess the impact of carbon emission. So how much their new design is gonna generate in term of carbon. And we are putting in place, as part of the move to the cloud, a green FinOps mindset. So FinOps is nothing new, okay? This is something that you do. It's a transformation of the of our way of working to cope with the public cloud, which is a new environment. Well, we call it green FinOps, in the sense that now our developer has not only optimizing our cost when leveraging the public cloud, but also optimizing our carbon emission. I cannot talk about IT without talking about security.
It's a big one, okay? And the security threat is increasing. So we believe that there is only one way to take security, and it is by design, meaning you start with security as a primary concern in the design of your application or your platform, and then you continue, obviously, with the implementation, deployment, and operation. And I'd like to give an example of that. As part of what the platform that we are building in the public cloud, we are changing the way we secure the system with Zero Trust architecture. This is something that we bring to our platform from the very, very design to ensure that we are at the next level in terms of security, even though we are moving to what is actually an open environment.
Then I think it's important to take security at the highest level in an organization, and that's what we do, okay? We have a Chief Information Security Officer driving all security activities in the organization. We have a global security operations center, which is able to react in real time to any security threat. We have a community of security practitioners, we call them White Hat, distributed in all organization to ensure that every part of the organization, every product, every team, is at the right level in term of security. I think there is another perspective that I'd like to bring on security, okay? It gets more and more difficult to get to the right level of security.
I mean, think about ransomware, think about data leak, think about what it takes to be compliant, PCI DSS, and all those audits that you need to do. It's more and more difficult, it's more and more costly, but we do it, and this is really, I truly believe, part of the value that we deliver to our customers. Before we finish, I still want to talk about two transformation, which I really believe to be important. The first one is about how we select and incubate technologies. I said at the beginning that technologies is going faster and faster, and it means that we need to be able to assess, select, incubate, and industrialize technology much, much faster than before.
To achieve that, we've put in place what we call our Technology Watch , which is a framework which allows our architect to proactively assess, select the technologies that will matter for us, and then quickly incubate and industrialize technologies in the organization. Remember I talk about generative AI? Well, generative AI is already something that we have integrated in a standard manner in our big data platform. So it is already today a standard tool for Amadeus developer in the organization. The second one is about partnership. You know that we have a strong developer workforce. We developed a lot of the software that we use, but we also rely on vendors, on partners, on startups, to get an open source, I cannot forget open source, obviously, to get access to technology.
But over time, we are moving and relying more and more on partners. It gives us access to state-of-the-art technology, and again, allows us to increase our speed. I'm thinking about Microsoft as a partner, obviously, but there is ServiceNow, Red Hat, IBM. Those are big, or even I would say, the best player in their domain, and they are our partners. What I'd like to do now is to quickly recap on what I believe to be the competitive advantages of Amadeus from a technology perspective. And the first one is I really believe, so our ability to deliver on massive multi-year IT program. Think about the TPF commissioning, think about what we are doing now with the cloud, and at the same time, delivering a system with the right level of stability and scalability. And then we have this unique positioning.
We have the biggest set of customers, I would say, the most innovative ones. We have a strong set of partners working with us with deep partnership, and we have this unique position in the fact that we have technology in every of the vertical of the travel industry. Well, this allows us to attract and retain the best talent in the industry, and I believe this is what makes us a leader in this industry. On that, I would like to say thank you, and we will continue with a testimonial from Microsoft. Hi, Judson.
Hi, how are you?
I'm good. Thank you very much for being here. It's a pleasure to be with you here today. You know, we've been on a journey.
Yes.
Think about it, the cloud transformation, the digital transformation, and now the AI transformation. What do you think about this journey?
This last decade has been, sometimes I think one that has sort of gone by in a flash, and in other ways, the cloud transformation journey that the entire industry has been on has been fascinating to watch. The speed of adoption of technology, the value that's come from cloud-scale economics and the technology flywheel that's come as a result of it has been very powerful. And the partnership we've had with Amadeus has just been fantastic throughout. Because if you think about it, we've been on a cloud journey together in helping to move all of the technology assets at Amadeus to the cloud, but it's really been about those outcomes. You know, how do we serve our mutual customers more effectively? How do we innovate together?
I think AI is gonna bring the next chapter of growth for our two companies.
Let's talk about generative AI. At Amadeus, we were early adopters of generative AI, your solutions.
Yes.
In fact, we were among the first to deploy Copilot
as part of Office 365.
Thank you for that, yeah.
We got something like 6,000 users.
That's great.
Yeah.
There are really three dimensions of value that I think everybody should get out of it. The first is at that personal level, like I described earlier. You should never have to create a first draft of anything ever again. There's this notion of managerial productivity that comes with the Copilot solutions when you implement them across an organization. And then finally, the idea of inclusive collaboration. This third dimension is a real unlock.
There is another area that gets me very excited.
It's a co-innovation that our teams are-
Indeed
... driving together.
Yes.
I'm curious to have your perspective. What are the projects in there that, you know, gets you excited?
Yes. So first of all, I'm really excited about the work that we're doing around airport operations. It's the perfect use case for generative AI. AI can bring this common thread of orchestration across all of those different roles in the name of serving the customer, all using natural language. So that's one I love. The other one is Microsoft is a customer of Amadeus. I like to think of us as Customer Zero of some of our own co-innovation, because it makes us better at serving you and think it makes us both better at serving our mutual customers. But we use Cytric inside of Microsoft, as many companies do, to run the backbone of all corporate travel and travel planning for our employees.
Microsoft, Amadeus, we are... You know, we have this long-standing partnership, but what is it? What does make us well suited to work together?
I think at the end of the day, we push one another to become better innovation partners, but the spirit of always wanting to improve and always wanting to create the next is something that we both share. It is a joint passion for, you know, wanting to create the next solution that's gonna empower our customers to be more successful. The second thing, though, that I think underpins that is an aligned set of values. You know, in all of these cases, we're putting technology to work for good. We're putting AI to work for good, responsibly, respecting people's privacy and their data, but at the same time, trying to leverage the data that they'll share with us to provide them with a better experience. And so fundamentally, those shared values really matter a lot.
And then finally, I'll come back to the point I made a moment ago, which is, you're the experts in your industry. No one's better than you. So the spirit of innovation, the alignment on culture and values, and frankly, this notion of two industry leaders that are masters in their own fields, coming together to provide great solutions.
Great. Well, Judson, I have to say thank you.
Well, thank you for the partnership. We really, really appreciate it, and thanks for this opportunity.
Hello, everyone. My name is Decius. I'm responsible for Airline IT Solutions and Airline Distribution . So this means you're gonna hear from me twice this morning, so I count on your patience and your attention. I would like to start with Airline IT Solutions and reminding you of what are the levers that an airline uses to grow their business. So I'm calling this the airline growth equation. So essentially, the two levers that the airline has is, number one, expanding as much as they can, the throughput of passengers, so carrying as many passengers as they can. And the second one is increase the yield per passenger, so means making more money out of every traveler. I think low-cost carriers have shown, and the industry in general, that, the expansion in terms of traffic, it's something that the industry can deliver.
Now, the other part seems a lot more elusive and a lot more tricky, which is getting into the point where we can actually make more money out of every traveler. This means that airlines needs to become effective retailers. It means that they need to have the ability to cross-sell, 'cause in order to stimulate traffic, you're making your base fare as competitive as you can, but once you lock the customer, you need to cross-sell and upsell. So that's why I'm calling this problem a paradox, because in one sense, you need to have operational efficiency to provide the lowest possible fare. On the other hand, you want to do personalization and servicing for each customer, and thus going into a differentiation strategy. So how do you merge those two worlds? How do you put them together?
We believe that the key to actually making a solution for this paradox is technology, and therefore, that is the opportunity for us here at Amadeus. So at a first glance, I wanted to, if any of you do not already know all of these numbers, but maybe introducing ourselves, again, a few other reminders. Who are we? We are the leaders in the Airline IT Solutions , both on the full service carrier space as well as the low-cost carrier space. It is very likely that if any of you have ever boarded a plane, this means that you have been processed by Amadeus technology, being on Altéa or in Navitaire. Obviously, this system is the PSS. It stands for Passenger Servicing System, so it is a system that sells and service passengers.
Our growth has been on deploying this PSS in as many airlines as we can. I think that the question that probably all of you are gonna come up with is, how many airlines there are in the planet, and how can Amadeus continue to grow as there is so many airlines that exist? After you sold PSSes to all of these airlines, how are we gonna grow? Therefore, it is why we have been looking into expanding our portfolio, so not only selling PSS, but looking more broadly and thinking about what are all of the other solutions that we can sell for an airline, introducing new modules, services, payments business. We're gonna talk about all of that a little bit later. This is where we are, and then I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my job.
So my job is to convince airline clients to migrate to Amadeus. So then let me share with you a little bit, what are the objections and what are the challenges that I face on an every day? So first of all, conversations always starts with hard facts and hard business case. So essentially, as customers are looking into, how am I going to increase revenue? So how am I going to reduce cost? And cost, in this case, can be of staff. So this means making the system, making them more productive, so they need less staff, less ramp up, or cost can be in terms of the IT envelope . So of course, you have cost into software and licenses, but you have costs in hardware, in system integrators, in internal IT staff.
So all of that, we use another acronym, which is called the TCO, the total cost of ownership. So a lot of the conversation it is related to, what can we do in terms of revenue and what can we do in terms of reducing the TCO? But these are just the hard facts. The other point is, usually when you're gonna go into an IT transformation, you need those business objectives met at a certain date, at a certain time. So this means that you're going to have here two choices: Do you outsource, and you trust on a vendor to deliver on those dates? Or do you go internal IT, and if you go internal IT, you're gonna have to deal with those dates with your internal CIO.
So I'm gonna come back later to that point, but let's suppose that we go ahead and we convince the customer that we're going into an outsourcing decision. Not only the hard facts, not only the outsourcing decision, but you have here a number of qualifiers of, is this technology provider suited to hand over the keys to the kingdom of the operation of my business? Because essentially, they are gonna be processing my passengers. So do they have the right technology stack? How are they secure in terms of protecting us from cyberattacks, no? Their applications, how are they gonna solve the problem end to end? And how can I minimize the costs of getting to what I want, which is reduction of cost and increase of revenue. Okay?
So if these are the questions and this is the challenge, let me tell you what are the answers that we have to these problems. So the number one is, we need to get to the question of, do I insource or do I outsource? And I think that's where our software as a service model comes into play. If you go and you decide go into the internal route, this means that there is a cost of opportunity of using your internal staff. There is capital allocation that you need to do. And the third is, can you put penalties, stringent contracts, and everything else on your internal IT department? And the answer most likely is no, and that is the advantage of having us as a third-party vendor.
So this means that we come, we do the investment, we do all of this investment up front, and as an IT provider, we only make money on the day that the software is running. So if you compare that to traditional system integrator, license, and other types of business, I think you can see the advantages of getting to the destination faster, safer, and without trying to find that capital allocation for an internal IT project, versus, for instance, deploying that same capital into fleet, into upgrade a product, or anything else that can be revenue-generating for an airline. So I think that's--that is our first argument in order to convince the customers to outsource. But then you're gonna get into, who do I outsource with?
Because I could outsource it with Amadeus, or I could outsource with other best-of-breed technologies, other, new entrants, other horizontal IT players. So what is our answer in order to say, why are we a better choice than them? And that is related to our industry and technical expertise. So this means that we have, for 35 years, selected 20,000 people who live and breathe travel tech. It means that we're present in all of the markets that they are. We have a diversity in terms of talent and people. That means that we always have someone that speaks the same language as our customer.
So all of these things are massive advantages compared to horizontal IT players that are not specialized in the industry, or new entrants that do not have the scale, the track record, and the amount of talent for you to hand over such critical projects on an outsourcing mode. So if you're convinced now that from horizontal IT players and new entrants we can win, then the next step is, but what about your traditional competition? Because they can be software as a service, and they as well have been many years in the industry. So what is our argument in order to win and to convince customers to choose us versus any of our traditional competitors? And this is everything that Sylvain has mentioned to you in terms of technology leadership.
We are the player today that invests most in technology, while we have done already our transition to open systems, when many have not even crossed that bridge. We're talking about that now we're going to the cloud, but not only moving to the cloud, re-architecting our applications so they become cloud native, as opposed to others who are just moving to the cloud. So we feel that on that domain, we have an edge versus the traditional players. So these are the arguments that I would say that makes us quite unique. I will continue on those points a little bit later. But now let's go back to our customers and say, what are they expecting about the future? So I was telling to all of you, this was all about retailing. And retailing here has some challenges. It's specifically for the full service carriers.
So when you talk about retailing, it starts by a concept that starts with IATA. By definition, a full service carrier game, that talks about the transformation of its processes from how everything was set up in the past, public schedules, seats, PNRs, tickets, everything very airline-specific, into a world emulating a digital retailer. What would be a digital retailer? Let's take the example here as Amazon. The retailing experience would be the idea that you can go and you can look at offers, you can look at choices, you put it in your shopping basket, you decide to settle, an order is created, and if any problem happens. It can be with part of the order, the full order, reimbursements, everything done digitally, everything done online. That is the ambition. That is where we want to get there with retailing.
So why is it particularly challenging for full-service carriers to go into that direction? It's because a lot of the service that you deliver, you deliver in partnership. So it means that it's not only you who needs to go into that direction. It means that all partners of your alliance, if you have a transatlantic alliance and you say, "I'm in Europe, and I have a partner in the US, and we need to deliver a service across the Atlantic," this means that you and your partner are gonna have to be on the same concept, on the same system platform, using the same Offer and Order concepts. So this is a massive transformation for the industry, and full-service carriers very much see this as the Holy Grail. Why?
Because it will allow them to be a lot more competitive on their domestic markets, because when they are competing with the low-cost carriers, they see in this simplicity their ability to emulate and to better compete with the low-cost carriers that do not have all of these interoperability requirements, and thus at the same time increase this possibility of cross-sell in terms of partnerships. So that's what the full-service carriers are looking into this. Interestingly, very curiously, low-cost carriers as well got very interested on the whole retailing transformation. So it's like, why are they interested on retailing? Because, I mean, in theory, they have an advantage. They are already on a simple environment. They are already being good retailers.
So then, why do they believe that this Offer and Order poses an opportunity for them and embarking on that same kind of transformation? The reason is, many of the low-cost carriers, and you get-- Sorry, you can get markets like India, like Brazil, or you can go to Indonesia, and you're gonna find that today, low-cost carriers are the leading airline on those markets. So this means that they have the leading connectivity. So what they start seeing an opportunity is, what if, not entering an alliance, but what if I could terminate traffic? What if I could do point-to-point and joint ventures and bilateral agreements where I can start playing more on that connectivity gain? So far, I have refrained from doing that because that was going to introduce a lot of complex- complexity in my very simple model.
When I look at Offer and Order s, I see a way that is a lot simpler for me to do integration and partnerships. So with that, you can see that, yes, it is the same retailing transformation, but you have, in fact, two angles to it and two points of departures. Why I'm saying that? Because you're gonna see that we will continue to having two solutions, one for low-cost carriers and one for full-service carriers, because we believe that that way, we're gonna be able to better cater for each one of their business objectives. I'll get back to this a little bit later. So let's introduce to you then, what is our solution for the airline retailing for full-service carriers. We have the name here, Nevio.
We have our chief legal counselor in here, so Nevio is the name that our legal department has allowed us to have. So that's what it, that's what it means. So Nevio translates into our offer that is responding to 2 trends. 1, you heard from Sylvain, we have massive transformation with the cloud. So when we are going today, selling applications, customers expect that your system is going to be cloud-native and will provide the possibility of customization, the modularity, the access to data, the self-service ability, all of the technical attributes that Sylvain has displayed to you. So this is our next generation and reinvention of Altéa, making sure that it complies with the new standards of modern applications.
But more than that, this takes us into a world where, essentially, we're going to build here a solution that will address the retailing paradox. So what are we, what are we doing and what are we introducing, and what is the difference between the PSS? So if I were to map here in the boxes, what a PSS does and what this new end-to-end solution does, a PSS essentially would be order management, a little bit of offer, a little bit of delivery. So as you can see, the scope of the new solution is much more ambitious. We're talking about a true end-to-end, and the ability to say we would have all of the possible modules that our airline would need in order for them to operate, sell, plan, configure their product, and service later. So why it is that important?
Because if I go back to the criteria with the customers, where I start with the hard facts, that I need to have answers for two things. The fact that I have a solution that is end-to-end allows me to be the one who will respond and be responsible for delivering the revenue increase. So this means, as I have from A to Z, I can say, I can commit in terms of you're gonna get that revenue upside. We're gonna come back to this a little bit later. But the fact as well, that I have a solution that is end-to-end, this allows me to see a win-win solution with my airline customer, where I can say, "I can do all of these services for you, and I believe that I can reduce your total cost of ownership." Why?
Because today, this is a number of vendors that are selling to this airline, and there is an ability to consolidate all of that business with Amadeus, and I'm going to be able to provide a lower TCO compared to what they have today on this idea of best of breed. Because best of breed means many necks to choke. So if you would like to deliver a solution end-to-end, it means that you need to talk to different vendors, bring system integrators, make them talk to each other, and ultimately, you are the cook, you are responsible for delivering that project and that solution. Here we're talking about an opportunity that you have one orchestra player, which is Amadeus, and you're gonna have one vendor that you can rely on providing the reduction in cost and the increase in revenue.
So the challenge that can be made is, that's just okay, we like what we hear. Modular sounds interesting, especially on the base that doesn't use Amadeus today. But what about the base that uses Amadeus today? Aren't you opening the door by making a solution that is modular for other new entrants to come in here and carve out parts of your system? And here is where I go back to the delivery of the experience end-to-end, and I'm going to show you many other examples. First, we believe that we're gonna be competitive in each individual module because we are the leaders, and we believe we will continue to invest in each individual module, and we're gonna be able to have an edge there. So I think that's, for me, my first answer.
Second answer, that delivery of the revenue or the delivery TCO, depends on the integration across the modules. So of course, you're gonna have a basic integration that is gonna be defined by IATA in terms of Offer and Order . But Amadeus will invest in delivering a superior integration of those modules, and we believe that that ultimately will make customers understand that it's better to focus and concentrate their business with us, than going into a costly and uncertain best of breed. I would like to point out a few other elements. This is one of the first applications that are gonna be making full leverage of all of the possibilities, technical possibilities that Sylvain has made and alluded to.
We're branding all of these cloud, how can I say, capabilities under the term Aviation Platform , and that's what allow customers to essentially customize to the exhaustion, the system, as well as integrate with other partners in the ecosystem that are going to be other very large, IT companies. An example of that is Adobe. We have achieved a level of integration between our e-commerce solution and Adobe, that essentially a customer that has the two systems, they work seamlessly, and the integration already done. One more point for reduction of cost of TCO, okay? So with that Aviation Platform , that is gonna allow us to Address another pain point that we had with the customers.
As we were expanding and as we were very successful, obviously, having every customer coming to the same factory to evolve the system, meant that there was a queue in terms of delivery of service. It means that many customers were asking us for improvement in the system, and we were not able to. We had to prioritize between them. Now, with Aviation Platform , essentially, we're gonna be able to create service centers. We're gonna be able to create dedicated services and staff. They're gonna be able to look after a customer, customize it, and be able for the customers to use our engine, at the same time, maintain their critical sauce, sorry, their secret sauce, and, and their priorities. Okay?
So with that, you can see that we're taking the opportunity of creating more touch points for us to integrate more solutions, such as payments, such as many other things that I will show in just a second. All right? So this is Nevio. Nevio, we already have three customers signed up. We have Finnair, which is already getting into production with deliverables of this application in 2025 and rolling out in 2026. We have Saudia, which is the flag carrier of Saudi Arabia, and we have just announced BA. So we have already these leading customers that are working with us, and here are some of the proof points that we have from Finnair, which is our first delivery.
We're talking about Finnair having a revenue uplift, thanks to Nevio, of 3%. So this is compared to the cost of the system, what you can deliver in terms of airline retailing, may provide a before and an after when you are using a PSS and when you're using this solution. And the other argument that we were able to do to these customers in order for them to embark on the journey with us, has been, we are your current PSS provider. We can guarantee you what is going to be the cost of transition. So this means that by doing a deal with us, you're gonna move from your PSS into the world of airline retailing with the security in terms of TCO. So predictability in terms of cost, proven revenue upside, track record of delivery, and minimum disruption to your business.
So I think that is the proposition that we believe it is a winning proposition for our customer base. Now, let's talk about the new customers. Many customers we were not able to address as, number one, the vertigo of migration. So every time that you're going to do one of these migrations, everyone will say, "This is a very large enterprise. It is gonna take years." There is an element of fear that if anything goes wrong, my job may be at stake. So how do we overcome that fear of migration? I think that over 200 implementations, I think we have established a track record, and we're talking about timelines that have moved from years into a recent implementation that we have done in nine months.
So I think that we are able to say we have a track record that we can reduce the fear of migration. But one thing that is very difficult for us to overcome is the cost of opportunity, 'cause no matter how much trust you have on us, that we're going to be able to migrate, every system migration means that you're gonna have to pause your IT programs in order to do the migration and then resume them, and thus, if you don't have a burning platform, many still do. So that is the good news. We can still progress on migrations as there are burning platforms out there. But if you're not on a burning platform, you may decide what is really the refresh and what is the cost of opportunity of doing that.
This is where we believe now with this new proposition, we have good news, because the fact that it's modular allow us to go into conversations with these customers on a path of migration that is much more gradual and step-by-step. So we feel that with that customization, with that possibility, with that modularity, we're going to be able to break into customers that so far had the vertigo of the possibility of doing a massive transformation in IT, as they are very large customer, very large airlines, and they say cost of opportunity may be too big in order to recover on an IT system. Okay? So this is Nevio. So then, if we're convinced and sold on the benefits of a Offer and Order transformation for a full service carrier, what about the transformation for a low-cost carrier?
Here, again, we have some of the similar benefits. There is the cloud native element of it. There is the possibility of using real-time pricing and dynamic pricing techniques. There is the part that I have just mentioned of participating more actively in what is going to be a connectivity business model. So not only having my point-to-point model, but starting to do JVs or specific agreements with carriers for terminating traffic. So for that, we need to upgrade our Navitaire system. We're introducing vNext. We will come with news of who are gonna be our first customers around this product coming. But sure, the target is the customer base that we have today, as Navitaire has most all of the leading brands around the low-cost carriers.
But I would like to point out, two more selfish objectives that we have implementing vNext, 'cause obviously, we can bring the benefits of Offer and Order to our customers, but I think that we have two pain points that we believe that we can address. Number one is the Navitaire system was very much geared and designed towards direct distribution. So this means that the relationship of low-cost carriers with indirect distribution was very difficult and had system constraints. The fact that we are reengineering and re-architecting Navitaire, allow us the possibility of actually bridging that gap and making low-cost carrier connectivity to distribution easier. So that is one selfish investment that we are going to do, and the other one is the possibility of aggregating more payment solutions in every touch point of Navitaire.
We had that very well integrated in our Altéa suite, and now we have the possibility of doing the same on the Navitaire touchpoints. Okay? So that is vNext. More to come. Now I'm going to take you to another area, which is more the delivery area. I think that all of the examples on what could we do in terms of sales for Offer and Order s come to mind, but where does that experience break? So I think that we can all imagine how could an airline retail better? How could they offer you a last-minute upgrade? How could they bundle three-day subscription of a streaming service so that you can download your content before you go on a long-haul flight. So it is like we can all start dreaming of the possibilities of what a retailing and an airline experience would be on the sale.
Now, the question happens, but what if it breaks down? So when it breaks down, it usually means that you're gonna be at the airport. It means that you need to be re-accommodated. It means that you have disruption, and that has usually been where the dream breaks apart and frustration sets in, because you paid for something, but you're not getting the service delivered. A lot of the delivery of the service, service happens at the airport. And today, Amadeus, because of the DCS, because of having the check-in system with all of the airlines, we are essentially present in most of the airports that are relevant in the planet because we already have the airlines that are flying there. So it means that we already have an infrastructure of connectivity. It means that we already have technicians. It means that we already have a presence.
So the obvious question for us would be: why don't we diversify into doing more for the airport in itself? Because once we go there and we have the Airport IT , and here, when we're talking about Airport IT , we're talking about many complex setups. Sometimes we're selling to the airport themselves, because they have common use infrastructure that many airlines will use if they have low frequency on their airport. Sometimes we're selling it to the airlines themselves, because if you're talking about a hub of an airline, it means they would like to have their own terminal, their own machines, everything branded and control that experience. But going back to that opportunity, there is a lot of opportunity in Airport IT itself by selling into many customers.
One example that we have here, we have just signed six airports in Malaysia, so these are the main airports in Malaysia. We have signed Western Sydney, we have signed Noida in India. So we were talking about us having the end-to-end delivery of the airport systems. And that opens opportunities for what? For us to say, if we have the system of the airport, and if we have the system of the airline, what kind of pain points could we solve? And we could get into end-to-end and delivery end-to-end passenger experience. Example here, given our acquisition of Vision-Box. So the last touchpoint at the airport that we didn't have was the border control. But essentially, it's thanks to our Airport IT , we have the machines at the lobby.
We can process self bag drops, we have the check-in, we have the auto check-in auto service machines at the lobby. It means that now we have the border control, it means that we have the control at the gate, and we have the biometric software. So what we're talking about, the ambition would be to allow a customer to be at home, be able to do their check-in on the phone and scan their biometric information, and that you could actually walk through the airport all the way to the gate, not having to present any other document than your face. Because you will be able to drop your bag, you would be able to go through security and the border control, you would be able to enter your gate because you have done your biometric enrollment at the first touch point.
So this opens for us a number of opportunities, not only on passengers, as well as what could we do in terms of bags, and as you have heard from Judson from Microsoft, what could we do in terms of airport operations? Because at the moment that I have at an airport like Changi, 93% of the flights that connect, land, or depart from Changi are processed by Amadeus technology. So what could we do in terms of data if we have the airport management system of the airport? We control the systems of the airlines, and we have all of that information on the cloud with GenAI available for the people who are working on the airports to manage more effectively operations.
So we feel that this is an opportunity for the future, both in terms of addressable market, as well as reducing pain points in terms for travelers, in terms of disruption, baggage loss, and many other things. So with that, I conclude in terms of where do we see the opportunity, as I think that at beginning, we're saying, if you are a PSS provider, how many more PSSs you can sell? I hope that based on this explanation, you can see there is a number of dimensions that we can increase. Yes, we can continue increasing in terms of market share, because we believe that we have a proposition that will cater for customers that are not our customers today, both in low-cost carriers as well as in full service carriers.
I hope you believe that we can expand the scope that we have with customers today, because from doing a simple PSS, now we can do full end-to-end solutions, and we enter into a new domain, which is services of customization. Where it means that we're gonna be able to add specific capacity to specific airlines and grow revenues as services, obviously, as a small proportion of what is our overall software revenue, because we continue to be a software company, but it opens that dimension of revenue as well. If you look at airport IT, I would say this is almost greenfield. We believe that we're quite unique now in terms of going to an airport and presenting the full end-to-end experience.
We do not feel that we have any given competitor that can deliver this part, and this is another, an additional EUR 2 billion addressable market that we're opening. Now, the other point that can be an upside, but it is not today in any of our projections, would be if we are successful on the road of modularity, if we are on successful on that road of providing services, why only service airlines? Couldn't we believe that certain modules like biometrics, like BI, like revenue management, could not be useful for other verticals within travel? So I think this is more a food for thought.
It is not something that we're ready to do, but it's something that we believe as we progress in our journey, and we deliver on the cloud, and we deliver on all of these projects, this can be an additional opportunity that can show up. So with that, I'll leave you with an interview with our BA customer, Colm Lacy, the CCO of British Airways. Right after the video, we have a coffee break. So. Then you'll hear a bit more from me on airline distribution after the break. So thank you for now. Thanks.
Decius, welcome here to British Airways headquarters here in Waterside.
Wow, this is impressive!
We're here in our Speedbird Heritage Centre .
So it's like our museum. It's got sort of aviation over the 100 years of British Airways.
Our partnership doesn't go as long as 100 years, 25 years of partnership. But you guys are a historical client of ours. I mean, you launched the RFP that got Amadeus into airline IT, so building Altéa, and now you chose us again, now for Nevio.
We've been on quite a journey together, and the change of actually the technology and the future of actually putting the customer at the heart of it is key for our business.
All right. Well, show me around.
Let's go.
So, Colm, exciting time for the industry, post-pandemic. We're moving from a discussion around recovery to a conversation around investment, digital traveler. How is your perspective? How is that working for BA?
It's a huge transformation that the industry is going through. You know, we've eked out what we could in terms of the old ecosystem, and now it's just not suitable for the complexity of our business, or more importantly, the expectations of our customers in terms of their digital experience. So for us, we are absolutely on a path of investment. It's for the longer term, you know, we're investing GBP 7 billion to build a better BA. That includes aircraft, but primarily, it also looks at our technology and our platforms, and we're also primarily looking at how we continue to invest in NDC.
As we know, we participate on this investment with Nevio, now our new modular solution that we are delivering to you. But, I mean, in your own words, how do you see Amadeus fitting into this plan?
I mean, Nevio, for me, is key in terms of actually moving towards Offer and Order, true order management. It's key for how we manage and serve our customers. It's about creating products and offers that our customers want at the right price, and be able to serve them up digitally, whether through our direct systems, but also through our partners, which is key in terms of our business. Nevio is the solution of how we're going to take this forward.
There is a lot of choice out there. There are a lot of vendors, a lot of providers. So why Amadeus? Why have you chosen us?
Well, you know, if you look back, we've got a good history of partnership. We've proven we can work well together. But for me, it was the vision that you and your team have of how you wanted to take this new product forward. Nevio aligned with our vision of what we needed for our customers, and you've proven that you can deliver great systems. As an airline, we need to operate 24/7, 365 days a year, and, you know, you have got robust engineering and products that work for us. For me, it was simple, you know, you are the partner that we wanted to work with.
Thanks for the partnership. We're very proud that we share the vision of putting traveler first, traveler at the center of the experience, and we look forward, and we look ahead of everything else that we're going to build together.
We're absolutely looking forward to working with you.
All right.
Take care.
We're back now with airline distribution. So let me start with introducing what is direct distribution and a little bit of the dynamics of the market, because I think this is important as we advance on the conversations, for you to establish where do we have the challenges and where do we have the opportunities. Okay? So the first thing is determining what is direct distribution and indirect distribution. So here, a lot of times, we are taking the airline angle to it, which there is an element of control. So as an airline, I would like to have customers as much as I can, for them to come to my direct website. Why is that? We have determined on the other presentation, that a lot of my growth depends on the ability to upsell and cross-sell.
So a customer coming directly to my website, it means I have an opportunity to upsell and cross-sell. As I have doubts, if the indirect distribution, it is equally motivated to be upselling and cross-selling my product in their channel. So why has that become very much the case? Because when airlines have cut the commissions, essentially, travel sellers, agencies, are not the agency of the airline anymore. They are the agency of the traveler.... Because before, travel agencies and airlines were aligned by a commission, which meant the higher you sell, the higher the money and the compensation that a travel agency would get. But now, with no commissions, it means that my value as a travel seller comes from the fact that I can find the cheapest possible alternative to my clients.
Thus, we have a conflict of interest between what the travel seller is doing and what the airline ultimately would like to guarantee. The question is, can I have control if something goes through my direct or my indirect channel? For the vast majority of cases, none of the actors that are here have any control of how exactly that distribution takes place. They are, most of them, markets that are parallel and independent. Why I say that? Because it is essentially a traveler choice. A traveler decides if they need assistance or not in order to travel. This means it is the traveler who decides the level of assistance that they need, and thus you may end up in direct or indirect. Where do these markets overlap and that there is a new reality?
It's especially on the OTA segment, where you can say, here, there is a phenomenon that is the distribution between consolidation of airlines that are now very large, and consolidation of OTAs and these large agencies that are very large. And you say, shall we really do business through a technology intermediary like the Amadeus Travel Platform, or shall we do business direct? And that overlap between direct and indirect that you're going to see, which is this direct connect/aggregator market. So direct, indirect, and some of this gray area in the middle. So let's go to our business, the Amadeus Travel Platform. What are the volumes that we power today? We power the complex trips, the high touch, high service type of trips. We power the many to many. So we're going to get to this, which is to say, why is this market so resilient?
Because the volumes that we have today at the GDS are extremely resilient. So why is this market so resilient? And it is that many of the customers that are buying through these travel sellers require level of assistance that is a higher degree than what you can get in self-service. Of course, every airline is going to make available an API or a website, that if you're capable of doing self-service, you're going to go there. But let's start organizing a few scenarios in here. But what if you're going and organizing a wedding? What if you are the Premier League and you are organizing trips for your players across the country and international on the Champions League?
What if you are having a corporation that does mining, that does offshore, and you need to work and organize crews of workers going? It's like all of these possibilities. Are they going to be managed by an airline website or an airline API? That's where the travel seller comes in. It provides a level of service that is different than what the direct channel can do, and thus, you have this situation of many to many. The other importance here of value is the away market. So you're going to see then why this business caters a lot for full service carriers and not as much to low-cost carriers.
So when I am a low-cost carrier, I'm usually selling, and even an airline, if you are on your home market, you're selling in an area that people know your brand, that trust your product, and you believe you can have that direct connectivity. But what if you are in a market that is far away from your home market? Let's get U.S. carriers in Japan. So what is the power of brand of a U.S. carrier in Japan? What are the volume of sales on a given travel seller of a U.S. carrier in Japan? So you're going to get into this atomization and fragmentation that makes any type of direct connection sort of impossible. And thus, you're going to use a common use distribution system, and that is the GDS, and that is the Amadeus platform. Okay?
So if we continue, then we go into other doubts that you may have, which is... Before we go here, let me just make one more point. So I just mentioned to you that the volumes of the GDS, quite resilient, no? But there may be questions in here of, okay, but if it is resilient like that, we had numbers in 2018, and we have numbers now, and how do they reconcile? No. So one explanation, it is that gray market that we just discussed. We need to address the direct connect and the aggregator. I'm going to do that later on the presentation. But I would like to point out the other important differences here, which has been the mix and the change of traffic that has happened in the market.
Because as we are saying that this is high touch and very complex type of trips, the more the trip is simple, the more the trip is leisure, the more inclined for that to be direct distribution. The more the trip is complex and requires high level of touch, the more it is indirect and part of the Amadeus Travel Platform. So what we can see in the industry in 2024 is that the industry has emerged with a different mix, much more leisure and much more domestic. So this has an effect in the numbers. And the second thing is, we did have geopolitical shifts, that important volumes that existed in the past in markets like Russia, like Ukraine, like the Chinese international traveler, some of these volumes never came back.
So thus, when we are talking about comparing the reality of 2024 with the reality of 2019, there are other factors, just then, direct connect, aggregators, and NDC, there are at play in order for us to have the volumes that we have today. The vast majority of the volumes we have, it is this many to many setup, and we believe this market will continue to grow, and it is extremely resilient. So as we go, the next doubt you may have around this business may be: but what is the sustainability of travel sellers in general? No, because probably the idea that we have of a travel agency, is the high street travel agency that I walk and I sit down in order to do a booking. So for sure, that high street travel agency, it's becoming less and less present.
But maybe we don't see players like Skyscanner as an intermediary that actually is a client of the travel platform of Amadeus. So maybe we do not see Booking.com as a travel agency, because not only they are selling their hotel, they're being powered by the group that is called here, Etraveli Group , that sells all of the air through Booking.com, is a customer of the Amadeus Travel Platform . And we can go on and on with many channels. So reality is, yes, the consumer has shifted to digital channels, but those channels are none of the less intermediaries, and for us, considered as travel sellers.
So as we see, we're evolving the language and not calling them anymore travel agencies, because it takes you to that space of that physical brick-and-mortar entity that is ceasing to exist, and going to a point of sale that is gonna sell travel. And that is growing, because banks are starting to look into how to sell travel. Other customers are bundling travel in their points of sale. So this is an intermediated market, is in expansion, and you have more and more digital players who decide that they will incorporate travel in what they do. And all of them will have a common need, which is, if I would like to sell travel, where I'm going to find all of the possible options of content, of seats, of prices that exist in the planet for me to give the traveler the right solution?
The technology that can provide that answer is the Amadeus Travel Platform and the GDS. Why do we believe that this is still very much the optimal solution? Here, I'm gonna start talking about how the GDS compares vis-a-vis, especially some of the substitutes that you're pointing out, such as aggregators and direct connects. The success of the GDS is that it is able to provide answers to different stakeholders that want something very different from the platform, in their own way. We just discussed about travelers. Travelers would like the maximum amount of choice and the quickest response time possible, and they don't care if it is direct, indirect, anything like that. The only thing they would like is choice, and in my terms.
You go to the travel sellers, as most of the time they're selling air on a zero commission basis, they would like that sale to be as productive as possible, because most of the travel sellers treat air as a loss leader in their business. Essentially, is I'm selling air in order to get the customer, so that I can sell them a hotel, so that I can sell them a car rental, so that I can sell them an insurance, 'cause those other products are commissioned. So we were talking about a different objective of travel sellers, which is finding the fastest, cheapest possible solution and being able to service the traveler in all of those details that I have just mentioned, of very complex use cases and very complex corner cases of high servicing that the travel seller wants.
And then you have the airlines, who—what would they like? They would like to do what we just described, increase my yield per passenger. So thus, if I'm making all of this investment in order to have a new retailing system, an airline retailing system, I would like to have a distribution partner that is able to talk NDC, that is able to talk dynamically, that is able to provide all of these new offers dynamically to my indirect channel. Why? Because otherwise, I'm leaving money on the table. Every time that a player and a traveler is coming direct, I'm able to upsell. But every time that they are coming in direct, that moment of upsell is not necessarily happening. Thus, I would like to have NDC. So then, who are we competing against? What are the other solutions? And what are their shortcomings?
So the first thing is, let's get the airlines and say, "I'm going to buy an NDC layer, and I'm gonna be making my NDC API available for indirect, for indirect distribution." How does that solve the problem of travelers who would like to compare? And how that solves the problem of travel sellers that would like to have that API integrated with all of the rest of the content in the most productive way. So as you see, yes, we have a substitute that can be the direct connect, but it is one-sided. It looks at the needs of the airline, but it doesn't look at the needs of the other stakeholders. Now, let's take the case of the aggregators.
The aggregators are trying to help travel sellers put all of the content together because the GDSs have 70, 80% of the content, but is missing 20% with NDC. So I'm gonna do an IT model where I'm gonna bring that 20% so that the travel sellers have what they want. But is that system really hooked up and integrated with the airline inventory? Does that give me real-time implementation and updates? Can I really do the servicing? What if I actually have to cancel that ticket and do whatever? So it is like, once you go into all of those details, aggregator cannot offer the full suite of automation that a GDS can. So that means that the travel seller is paying, and you could, you could argue the aggregator can get better, and they can expand, and they can expand in functionality.
But what is the available income of travel sellers for paying for IT? So it is like, how are you gonna build a sophisticated distribution system based on an income that is coming from thousands of agencies at a very minimum amount of fee per transaction? So there is a limit in scalability and investment with the aggregators. And again, we have the traveler that at the end of the day, just wanna get all of their solutions. So then why do we believe that we're gonna have an opportunity to continue growing? The number one is we have seen, based on the resilience of the many to many markets and the limitations of both direct connects and aggregators, that this alternative distribution faces issues of scalability. And as it faces issues of scalability, it poses as well, a problem and a threat to my airline retailing objectives.
Because if I do not have my indirect channel operating dynamically and having NDC at scale, then it means that part of the benefits that we just saw at the airline solutions are not gonna be able to materialize on an important segment of revenue for me. So now I have every intention of making this at scale. It has become a game that is not anymore only about the cost of distribution. This is as well about enabling revenue on every trip. So as you go into that direction, you say, "As I'm having difficulties, and as I have in-sourced that, business," if you look at age of these developments, many of these APIs are now reaching the 10-year cycle.
So this means that many airlines are looking into, "Will I continue to invest and actually reinvigorate and regenerate the API that I have developed ten years ago? Or now is it the time to outsource, and to outsource to a player who has better APIs?" So this is, for me, an opportunity within the airline IT, but just making a link with the previous presentations, we have already 50 airlines of our 200 airlines who have decided to outsource their NDC APIs to ourselves. Why is that important for distribution? Because it means that I can integrate that NDC content in a transparent manner in my GDS. So the more I win in airline IT with my NDC API and Nevio, the more I make my life as a GDS easier to aggregate that content. So I think we have an opportunity for that.
We have an opportunity because as we have this many to many network, and many of these volumes that are today with direct connects and aggregators are out of my system, the question is: Can I re-intermediate them? Can I bring them back? And in order to bring them back, you need to believe that I am able to bring them back at a cost-efficient price, that I can compete with the aggregators and with the direct connects. But unlike my competitors, those volumes are not vital for me. With an NDC API provider, that is my core business. With an aggregator, that is their core business. For me, re-intermediating this volume, it is ancillary and incremental. So this means that I can be cost competitive against these players, and I can bring back that once I have the GDS machine operating at NDC.
You're gonna ask me: So when are we gonna have, and how are we gonna have the GDS machine operating with NDC? That's my next slide. So just allow me to go through these others. So I think this is our value proposition for airlines, and I think our value proposition for travel sellers becomes much easier. Because essentially what I'm saying is, you already have an API with me today, you already have a front office with me today, you're using a suboptimal technology, which is an aggregator. What if I told you that I have solved the problem? I have the NDC content. Would you come and focus your business only with me instead of continue using aggregators? And the vast majority of the cases, the answer to this question is a sound yes, because it reduces their cost of IT.
Because they say, "Great, I already have a relationship with you. I can source one more, I have one more content source with you. Obviously, I'm going to do." And the other interesting thing and dynamic of the market that is happening, because of this fragmentation of content, the idea of having multiple GDSs, it's starting to lose steam. Because essentially, is the paradigm has shifted from what content you have in one GDSs versus the other, in terms of what contents GDSs have and what content is outside. So if all GDSs have more, more or less the same content, I'm only gonna pick one, and I'm gonna usually pick the best.
So we feel that we have an opportunity to consolidate GDS volumes as they will consolidate their IT investment on the best GDS, and we believe that by cracking the NDC aggregation, we will be able to take the volumes away from the aggregators into our platform at an incremental rate, and thus, creating more opportunities. I will come back into what other opportunities this creates, because this reaggregation of content not only is useful for the Air Distribution business, but as well for other businesses that we have in the company. Because as I just said, a travel agency sells air as a loss leader in order to sell other things. So this means when we capture that transaction, it opens the door for us to have more hotel distribution. It opens the door for us to have more car rental distribution.
It opens the door for us to have more to attach another payment transaction. So this means that not only it is a question of the Air Distribution business in itself, it is as well bringing these volumes back creates for me a bigger addressable market where I can attach other parts of the business that are growing, and thus having more monetary value for the same transaction, and having an advantage versus these players that are one-sided that can only remunerate at a very low rate, looking at the problem from only one angle. So if I go with that, what is the challenge that we have in order to make NDC a reality?
So as you understand from the origins and the beginnings of NDC, there was tension, especially on that gray setup end market, where airlines are looking at us and saying, "Number one, I don't believe that your EDIFACT set up..." EDIFACT, it is the previous technology, that powers the GDS. "So I don't believe that your former set up actually is fit for purpose in terms of cross-sell and upsell. So the first thing that you need to do is a technology upgrade in order to be able to consume NDC." So that was pain point number one.
Pain point number two is: I'm okay to have a business model like we have, transactional on the rates that you have today for the small-to-small distribution, but on the large to large, I don't think that paying the price and the average price that you have, it is a problem. So here you have a, let's say, an opportunity for us in terms of reaggregating those volumes back. So as we move to NDC, the value of distributing away globally on the small fragmented market, it is in net terms, very much the same. And we say net to positive, because not only we see the opportunities of growing wallet share, of paying less incentives and doing another thing, so we feel that this is a productive change in terms of our small-to-small business.
But it does open, again, an opportunity for us to re-intermediate that large to large, because then I can now separate those volumes and make a very special deal with different economics around that volume and bring them back, competing with the direct connect and competing with the aggregators. So that is—if the airlines believe on that value proposition, then they're gonna sign with me, and they're gonna say, "I'm achieving my objectives." So how many airlines have looked at this proposition and said, "I'll provide you with a vote of confidence. I'm going to provide you with my NDC content, and I'm gonna give you a fair fighting chance against direct connects and aggregators"?
And I would say, literally, every airline today that has an NDC program has signed up, so it is either implemented or in implementation with us in terms of looking at us as an additional volume and as an additional channel for NDC. Because they understand the limits of scalability, and they believe that with us, they're gonna be able to achieve their revenue objectives and cost reduction faster. And that was my key asset that I needed in order to convince agencies to book into the platform, because that is the whole value proposition that the aggregator had and that I didn't, is they had the content that I did not. On the moment that I have the same content. Right now, it was only exclusive to aggregators.
I put myself in the game of leveraging my relationship, my superior technology, and everything else to go back to travel sellers and say, "If I have that NDC content working perfectly, why are you using an aggregator, and why wouldn't you bring those volumes back?" And those conversations are taking place, and we believe that we're going to have success in re-intermediating. Again, economics very different on the re-intermediation and on the overall distribution; we feel that the model is very much the same, with possibility of growth on the small to small, with the same steady growth that we have experienced on the years before COVID. So if that is the case, then what are gonna be the levers that we're gonna use, in summary, for us to grow the distribution business?
The number one, we will continue relentlessly going after volume, because as this is a fixed price machine, the GDS is same cost to operate in 195 markets in the world. Having the people connecting to the same agencies, the cost is the same for me, for my competitors, or for an airline that decides to insource. So this means that the player that provides the maximum number of transactions can dilute that cost per unit on a better basis. That's why we always say, we believe the economical case for a direct connect or an aggregator versus us, we're processing the biggest amount of transactions and believing that we're gonna bring even more transactions into our numbers, we will be operationally and cost competitive against any alternative that exists in the industry. So we'll continue doing that with the full service carriers.
I think what is interesting is because we have discussed on the airline solutions, that now distribution of low-cost carriers is much more in reach. Because the pain points were, number one, they had a host system that could not connect well with the GDS based on the industry standards of tickets and everything else. If we're gonna upgrade Navitaire, if we're gonna make it Offer and Order , and if we're gonna make that vNext system NDC compatible, we believe we're removing the technical barriers and the business line barriers in order for LCCs to participate. Second thing, the business model around the distribution has changed quite a bit. You have a whole bunch of carriers there now using a cost recovery mechanism. This means that the price that they pay us, they add a surcharge, and that is passed on to the traveler.
So essentially, the net cost of distribution for the airline is zero. So that is a model that will be very appealing for the low-cost carriers, because if they use the same techniques as the full service carriers, essentially, you're saying that they're opening new channels without having the added burden cost of distribution, and for us, in net terms, we still get our fee. And the third example of why low-cost carriers will move into that sector is because you can see on the news how low-cost carriers are, because of the range of the new aircraft, because of even some low-cost carriers buying wide body planes, it means that the idea that low-cost carriers are going to have two-way traffic grows.
If you're gonna have two-way traffic , you need someone that will help you with the sales, because you may fill your plane going in, but how are you gonna fill your plane coming back? This means you need partners, this means you need travel distribution, this means you need travel sellers that will help you on that mission, and thus, we're going to see, and we believe we're gonna see more low-cost carriers. By re-intermediating full service carriers, introducing low-cost carriers, we feel, we're gonna bring volumes into the system. We believe that there is opportunities for additional services, in particular, the corporate customer base. We are talking about large enterprises who look more and more on having their own digital environment for their employees.
So today, they are procuring travel through travel agencies, but if you are a global enterprise, that may means a patchwork of solutions that you have across the planet by using several travel agencies. But what if you'd like that integrated with Microsoft Teams? What if you'd like to have that integrated to your SAP system? What if you like to have the whole digital environment to give that to the employees? You're starting to shift your procurement from looking that full solution from a travel agency, more into looking into a technology company that can actually provide that service, and having the agency as someone that is going to do the fulfillment on top of that booking tool. So that's where we're going with our Cytric Easy solution in conjunction with Microsoft, because we see an opportunity for technology.
We're gonna leverage our partnership with the travel sellers to make that sale fully integrated and making them part of what is going to be a new digital corporate experience. And last but not least, we have the last point, which is the cross-sell/upsell, which is what we have just discussed. Air, it's good in itself, and Air Distribution is important as a business in itself, but it opens the doors for many other businesses in terms of providing us data, payment opportunities, and cross-sell opportunities of baskets of products outside of air, like hotels, car rentals, insurance, rail, and many other possible products in the basket. So because of that, we feel optimistic about the growth of travel distribution, both in terms of opportunities as well as in consolidation of the market.
With that, as I'm not coming back on stage, I thank you for your attention, and I'll see you on the next opportunity at lunchtime. Thank you.
Hi there. I'm going to talk to you about hospitality. My name is Paco Pérez-Lozao. It's great to be here with you. Let's take us through the journey of hospitality. When we started looking at this industry, after our IPO in 2010, people were asking us: Where do you see the opportunity? In a very simplified way, we said, "Well, this is how the industry looks like." In many ways, we'll repeat that message today, and it resounds with our customers and with our partners. It's, some people would say, oversimplifying a spaghetti, okay?
So we have a cohabitation of on-premise solutions, for example, the property management systems, which is critical for hotel properties, cohabitating with a flurry of central systems at enterprise level, like, for example, the central CRS or the channel connectivity, and in many ways, those connectivity plays coexist. For example, the PMS has inventory of rooms, has prices as well, has channel connectivity, has guest profiles. The enterprise also has all that in their central systems as well, okay? And they are not consistent. So it's very difficult for this industry in this fragmentation of data to really operate, like, for example, do the airlines today with centralized, consistent data models and with technology that really can evolve at the speed that it is required today. I will give you an example.
Some of our customers have property management systems on premise that at the same time connect on premise to almost, like, 20 other solutions, okay? You can imagine the cost of maintaining that because it's the property or the hotel chain that needs to deal with all this cost, with all these multiple providers. Just to give you an example, we today connect in our ecosystem to 400 different demand channels, and we connect with roughly 130 PMS interfaces, okay? Over 100 PMSs that we deal with today. So when we see that, it is a phenomenal opportunity to bring technology integration at scale in a modern way to help the industry really move ahead in a much more, in a much faster pace, embracing all the new technologies.
That is a little bit why we decided to go into this in a mix of organic and acquisition over the last 14 years. So moving on, what do we see in terms of market trends, and why does this even give us more conviction that we're on the right track? So first of all, there is some market consolidation going on, okay? If you look at the top three customers that we have in our ACRS, we'll talk in a second about that, Marriott, IHG, and Accor. They alone in the pipeline, the three of them, have roughly 4,000-5,000 properties that are new, going to come into their networks over the next years, okay? So we are going to grow together with them, okay?
So also, we see that these large players used to have in-house technology, IHG and Marriott as well. And they have, in spite of their financial muscle, decided to go with us because they now consider that we are ahead of the curve, and they cannot compete with in-house solutions against what we are bringing to the market, okay? So there's an increasing reliance on outsourcing technology with the big players, not to talk about everybody else in the industry who cannot afford, really, in-house technology anymore. So the second trend is digital transformation, digital merchandising. You heard from Decius how airlines are moving into that realm. We have that in the hospitality industry, even more at scale. And why is that? Because hotels have so much more to offer in terms of services, really, than airlines.
So the pressure to merchandise what a property has to offer, let's say, imagine a Caribbean resort, okay? What they have to offer and merchandise is so rich that it's and they can't, let's say, bring that in a proper way to the customers in a digital way, into the channels in a digital way. Many of the big enterprises as well are working through brand expansion by adding more brands, okay? For example, Accor. It's not maybe the exact number, but order of magnitude, they have 40 different brands in their estate, and they need to differentiate them between the Fairmonts of the world and the Ibises of the world. Simple service, okay? So how do I do that, okay? How can I bring that differentiation to my customer, okay? That's another challenge that they have. They want to personalize.
They really want to be able when to recognize beyond their loyalty base, Bonvoy. I don't know, I think they have 400 or 500 million members, but they want also to be able to merchandise to customers that are not Bonvoy members as well, okay? So how can I do that, okay, in a proper way, beyond loyalty? Starting with loyalty, but going beyond loyalty, okay? And evidently, improve revenue, okay, through higher conversion of customers and through higher upselling of room services and non-room services. Very important, non-room services as well, okay?
Another trend that we're seeing, and this is favoring us, because you will see in a moment, we are very focused on working with the hoteliers to solve that problem, which is not an easy one, because you can solve it tactically by wrapping around, or you can solve it structurally by going in the core of it, and I will tell you, we chose the second way. What is that difference, okay? And then the third one is, luxury. We see the affluent travelers, okay? We see that... By the way, the latest sort of the industry talk is that there is a trend that will continue, that demand is outpacing the offering side on hotels, okay? Hotels are working hard, especially in Asia, to bring new properties.
It takes, on average, in countries like India, six to seven years to get a new property between the plan and having that operational. So with the affluent travelers, especially in Asia, now growing very fast, and all hotel chains focused on Asia expansion, this is helping us. This is a good case for us because we are a global operator, but also, there is also a move towards luxury, the luxury chains. If you look at the pipeline of these properties that I mentioned, on average, the luxury properties represent a higher percentage than what they represent today in the fully state, no? So there is more investment going towards higher-end, higher sort of luxury properties. Okay?
So then, there's another trend, which is very new now, which came out at a conference in the United States at NYU with the sort of investors and the hotel chains, which is that this year, they see the events market booming, and is the fastest growing segment, and that will help us as well. I'll show you in a second as well. Okay. So then, looking at this, okay, the question is: How are we positioning ourselves? And we said, okay, so probably we should help the hotels sort out the spaghetti of the demand channels. So we said, "Okay, let's help them drive profitable demand." And we'll talk later in what are our answers to that, okay? The second thing is they need to improve operational efficiency as well. How can we help them with that?
In COVID, especially, and post-COVID, with a shortage of personnel, okay, there is a strong drive into operational efficiency, okay? How can we, let's say, increase productivity because labor shortages are still existing in the hospitality industry today, okay? And then the last one, which is really the core of it, is: How can we help them better engage with their guests through digital means, okay? Being that when they are thinking about, how can I bring my offer through a digital channel, okay, to pre-check-in, post-check-in, post-stay surveys, digital email campaigns, all that sort of different services. So what our strategy has been is to create a very broad core portfolio. We claim today that we have the broadest portfolio of any other provider in the industry. We'll go through that, okay?
Because of that, we need to have a very, very proactive ecosystem connectivity program as well, okay? We'll talk about also. So we have a myriad of partners of interconnectivity situations, in the amount of 1,300 different partners with who we work today. The channels, the PMSes, the revenue management solutions. We'll talk about that in a second as well, okay? We have the most broadly partner ecosystem we can talk about. On top of it, we are investing. We believe that this is so transformational in its core, that you can do, not do that through tacticism, and that you need that through long-term evolution. The hospitality industry, in general, is not necessarily seen as a fast embracer of new technology, okay? So this means that we need to have a long-term perspective as well here, okay?
So while we continue to get new chains to join our ecosystem, okay, and the size is quite significant by now, we are a long-term player. And this is also what the big of what our customers like about us, because they say, "You're just not coming to sell me a solution, you are becoming my partner in this world of changes." So as Sylvain described this morning, we are permanently upgrading the system, okay? And we're in permanent discussion with our customers and to what is it next that needs to be done, okay? Like new Chinese channels or like new, on the cloud, property management systems, et cetera, et cetera, being what it is. All the transformation that's coming now of revenue management based on attributes. We'll talk in a second what that is. Okay?
And then, obviously, the transformation, this massive transformation needs to be done in a more simplified way, moving that to the cloud, okay? So all the new solutions we're developing are cloud native, but we are also shifting the legacy to the cloud, transforming it and shifting it to the cloud. Why is cloud so important? Because you're moving away from a spaghetti of connectivity on-premise, to a very simplified data-centric architecture, okay? With much simplified connectivity in the cloud, okay? And without that, it's virtually impossible to move this IT ecosystem ahead in its current fragmentation. That's why cloud is not simply, I would say, an efficiency password. It may be or not, but for us, the main reason to move things to the cloud is to make things simpler, and as Sylvain said, much faster, okay?
Because you do an upgrade there once, and it's there for everybody. And you can do that virtually every day, as often as you wish, okay? In a seamless way. The moment you have one of these modules, which with you have to interface on-premise, the whole thing becomes much more complex, much more difficult, much more expensive, with much more friction, okay? So then, with that, obviously, we're talking about environmental as well. We are implementing carbon footprint, for example, counters into different solutions, so we're working on that as well. Now, let's move on. So in our ecosystem today, as we speak, contracted, we have 65,000 properties globally, okay? We operate virtually in every market in the world, okay? Which is probably by count, if not the largest, probably one of the two largest customer ecosystems that we have. This is across our stack, okay?
We have, for distribution, and this is one of the businesses that we also cover as well, hotel distribution, 1 million properties. Okay, why, why this bigger number? In the world, we think there are roughly 400,000 hotels. So the definition of a hotel, you know, can be a little bit gray at times, especially in the long tail. But if you say, okay, let's say a building with 15 rooms that get rented out in the hotel model, that's probably 400,000 in the world. We are adding a lot of alternative accommodations into that, okay? So we are virtually aggregating everything that moves out there in terms of hospitality, okay? To these 1 million-plus offerings, that we then channel primarily through the GDS.
Through the GDS, we connect into that metas, we connect OTAs, we connect all sorts of players, the travel sellers that Decius talked about, okay? So then, I mentioned 1,300 partners, by the way, okay, before. And we also carry in our business unit what Decius talked about, which is car distribution, which has been growing very nicely, actually, with 81 mobility providers. It's car rental companies, but it's also transfer providers as well. We claim today to have materially the largest content of any other sort of aggregator worldwide, okay? So this is growing very nicely, quite nicely. So for example, here, Greg, Expedia is one of our very important customers in that, okay?
And then, we provide insurance here, we call it Travel Protection , because, we are moving away a little bit from traditional policies into more sophisticated insurance on algorithmic base that have been appearing, so we're also cooperating with them, okay? And then we have 3,200 professionals specialized in hospitality, okay? Being the product managers, being the engineers around the world. So how do we organize ourselves? In order to take the challenge on us and to be able to develop that opportunity in a very focused way, we have organized ourselves in three groups, in three profit centers, okay? One of them is Hotel IT , the other one is a Demand Generation , which is, in reality, digital Media and Distribution . That's about demand. Hotel IT is about solving that spaghetti as well.
And then we have a third one, which is very, very important. It's a little bit smaller than the others, which is BI. And because we are moving to a world quite quickly of data centricity, this BI thing is becoming very, very important, okay? So then, let's move on. So I will now, each slide, present what we do in each one of these three blocks, okay? So the first one is the block of Hotel IT , okay? Solving the spaghetti, okay? In the cloud... When we have two CRS offerings today, one is catered to the high-level enterprise that want data centricity, that's ACRS. I'll describe in a minute what that is.
We have our iHotelier suite, which is catered for mid-sized chains, but because mid-sized wants not to just buy best of breed like the enterprise do, and they need, because of all those problems of integration, a more end-to-end solution with inventory, with a booking engine, with a digital guest interaction tool, with a call center, et cetera, okay? We run that suite, specialized for the mid-market. If we count our customer base for the two of them, we are today already worldwide leaders in that segment, okay? So then, and we have, by the way, Yassine Dersin here, sitting here. He's the owner of this property and some others, okay? And he's a customer of this iHotelier suite, and also of another solution that we have here, which is Delphi, for event management. So this event has been organized with our software, okay?
So then let me talk about the four of them and describe a little bit what it is. So ACRS, the new kid on the block. So why is it so different, okay? When we started first with InterContinental to get together with them, and they had several times tried to move away from their legacy ACRS, several attempts. Remember, by the way, the CRSs that the hotels used are more or less, without hardly any exception, derivatives from airline inventories, okay? When the GDSs were defined in the seventies, okay, they developed the concept of fare classes for the airlines, then for cars, different, three or four different types of cars, A, B, C, D, E, and then room types, single and double, more or less. Oversimplified, okay?
Those concepts has been since the, when GDS came to live in the eighties and in the nineties, hard-coded into how the hospitality industry works, okay? When you look into the hotel web pages, when you look into the OTAs, okay, everything that's being displayed in terms of hotel content is evolving around room types, okay? Single and double. So when we sat together with IHG, IHG said, "Guys, we must, we must structurally change and break away from that." Why? Because of what I said before, because we are much more than a room type. We're a high floor, low floor. We're a sea view, beach view. We're breakfast, we're a spa, we are... So we have so much more that we can do. Why are we confined to have to display in our webpage single or double, okay? Oversimplified.
So this is when this concept of, let's decompose that thing into its logical components, okay? And this is when this buzzword of attributes came about, which is, let's develop something in the core with a different data model, with a different inventory of what you really are, okay? So what are you? Well, we are all these sea views, these garden views, these double beds, these king-size beds, all that, in different compositions. So then, and that, we built that natively for room types, for room inventories, we call it, and non-room inventory, natively into the inventory. And why does it have to be in one single space?
Because, and we'll describe that later, when we want to merchandise and dynamically price things and dynamically revenue management before you even dynamic price them, dynamically price them, all that in 150 milliseconds, if you don't have a consistent data model behind you and a consistent architecture, it is impossible, okay? Let me give you a simple—Well, later, I'll give you a simpler, an example of these things, okay? So then, that was objective number one. Objective number two was, guys, and we need to make this thing work with the volumes that we are going to create in terms of transactions on this thing. When we really start to digital merchandising, humongous compared to how the systems work today. So it has to be virtually infinitely scalable, infinitely scalable, okay? And it has to work literally in these 150 milliseconds.
So how we can do that, okay? So what we said, "Okay, for that, you have cloud-native technology, where you have, let's say, instances, Sylvain said it, of course, near to wherever your consumers are, okay?" And then the last thing was: Okay, and this needs to be operationally super resilient. Our current solutions break down all the time. It is a hassle because a CRS really is the core of what we do, and all the other systems are connected to the CRS. It's really the core, okay? So this thing should never really go down because it's so disruptive. Okay, again, the answer, cloud. So for IHG, for the others, we're running 6 different instances, real-time replicated, so that whenever something happens here or there, the others automatically kick in.
So this is how you reach these 99.99% that Sylvain was talking about, okay? Super important. Okay, so with that, and the last condition we discussed is, by the way, this should be a community system, okay? So you need to accept, IHG, that as we mature this thing, okay, we are going to let others join, even if they are your competitors, this type of technology, okay? And they accepted that. For them, it wasn't easy because their first discussion was: how strategic is this to me, okay? And when Marriott decided to go that way, they also have accepted that philosophy of, okay, I'm accepting that the heart of what I'm operating goes to you.
The beauty of this is that as we started with IHG, talking about this core inventory and core data repository, when we go with Marriott and Accor, we're expanding that, no? So we say, "Okay, now we are going to be your PMS interfacing layer. Now we are going to be your channel interfacing thing. We're going to be your reporting sort of tool as well." And gradually, as we go with them, and piggybacking on the investments that they are allowing us to do because they are massive sort of customers, we can sort of expand that to a full suite of solutions. And as we implement them, we are enriching our iHotelier mid-market suite, okay?
So the channel manager connectivity that's scaled for much more performance and much more volumes because of the merchandising thing, we're going now to integrate that also into the iHotelier suite, the reporting modules, the PMS interfaces, everything that comes, until there is a moment in time that the only difference between the two will be the core inventory, where in one case, it's rooms, and in the other case, it's attributes, okay? But the idea really is to bring this down and convert. So there will be a moment where we will come to you and ask you, "Do you want to move to this new model or not?" By then, probably, we will have maximum experience how this works, and then we will have to transition that here.
But if you don't want to, still, it will be compatible in working with the room type, even in the new type of inventory, okay? So that is, let's say, our strategy moving forward. And as I said, what's behind us, what makes us believe that we're on the right path, is that we are having behind us the leaders in the market, but also we are now talking to mid-sized brands, and they like that vision. So the question is, "Okay, when we, can we get it?" Okay, we say, "Okay, okay, let's first, sort of wrap up Marriott and then Accor, and then we-- as soon as we can, come to you as well." By the way, in the Marriott and in the Accor realm, okay, there are mid-sized chains, no? I mean, there is a Fairmont in Accor, for example, okay?
Why wouldn't a competitor of Fairmont, if they don't belong to an enterprise, be able to take that technology as well, okay? But not an end-to-end solution, really, that we don't have today, so they would need to go more native into CRS. Now, so let's talk about Delphi. There, we are also market leaders, okay? We power, we are the product and service of reference for event management in the world. I can say that easily. The largest hotels in the world, in Vegas, for example, the largest properties in North America, sit in Vegas, 7,000 rooms, okay? As large as probably a small mid-sized chain, okay? One property. All these guys on the street, almost all of them, are customers of Delphi, okay? And so many other customers, like, for example, here today, okay? So what does it do? It manages events.
In some of these properties in Vegas, they have, in one day, up to 300 concurrent events. Massive, massive sort of properties, okay? They manage that with this software. So what are we doing now? We are building a simplified version to bring that to the mid-market, okay? We'll talk in the expansion vectors about that, okay? So this is here we are market leading. And, by the way, as I mentioned before, this is a market that is now not booming, but is the fastest-growing segment for the big hoteliers, okay, at the moment. Events. What are we doing on top of that? The events usually are sold through RFPs with a very manual and intermediated process, okay? So then, with some of our customers, we have built on top a layer, an enterprise layer, where we aggregate all the inventory, event...
meeting room inventory of every property in the state into one single space. So we create literally an inventory of event space, okay, so that they can create a booking engine on top to transact small meetings in a real-time way, like you would sell a hotel room, okay? And we are beginning to do that as we speak. That's starting, okay? And the last one is, HotSOS, which is also the leader in its market, is a property management and maintenance solution, more catered for the high-end of properties, luxury properties, okay? We saw a lot of demand for that through COVID. Why? Because of the lack of people on the properties. Hotels still needed to be maintained, so that is a solution where demand, sort of outstripped our expectations here, okay?
We are also here moving to the cloud, and we are bringing that down now to the mid segment as well, okay? That's another vector of expansion. So that's, in a simplified way, the IT stack and the core of our IT strategy, okay? Let's move on to the second click block, Demand Generation . So then, in Demand Generation , we have what Decius has described, distribution, on the right-hand side. So what do we do? We connect all these 1 million different purchasing instances or hotels or alternative accommodation providers, and we put them into our channel. But what we also do is we connect the customers that we host in our inventories to every channel. I mean, we are not counting that here, where there is a hybrid, for example, when we connect them to the meta searches, we count that as distribution.
But here there is a little bit of confluence of IT provisioning and distribution for some of these other channels, okay? But this is what we do here. So we aspire, or we have, the broadest set of content possible and channel it to this, to the GDS primarily today, okay? We do the same thing for car. Mobility, is what we call it, as I described before, and we do the same thing for travel protection. What we are also doing is, for example, in the iHotelier stack, I think I mentioned that we also provide the booking engine to our customers. So one of the things that we want to do is to expand the content of the hotel booking engines with this extra content so that the hotels can merchandise that as well, okay? So we are experimenting with that.
So now, the other area. By the way, and this area has been doing very nice, piggybacking on the strategies that Decius has been describing, so it's been really growing very nicely. You know, in hotel distribution, many of the retailers that take the air GDS by default, they don't necessarily have been taking the hotel as a GDS provider, for hotel content, GDS providers by default. And many of them have built their complex connectivity backends, no? Similar to what some of them want to do with Air Canada , no? And they have realized that this is very complex, very difficult. So increasingly, we are gaining traction, and we are pushing into those same guys, asking them, "Hey, guys, why are you doing all this complex thing if we can bring that to you in a much more easy way?" Okay?
So there we see a lot of growth, okay? Also, we want to increase the leisure distribution channels. There's a big difference in the hospitality industry, how leisure content gets sold, and we are trying to push also into these leisure channels. With the content, this means also that we have to broaden our content and maybe introduce alternative sort of business models, like commission models that go beyond just a pure GDS booking fee. So then, the other one, Demand Generation , is digital media. And digital media is actually a quite interesting thing. Why? Because it's evolving now very quickly. You know that at the end of... So what do we do here?
We do, in a very simplified description, digital media campaigns, multi-channel campaigns, through Google, through Facebook, every other sort of digital channel for our customers, and we sell that more or less in a media model. Okay? So then, why are we so good in doing that? Because we have so many proprietary data. I will refer in a second to the AI, okay? But beyond that, we have many other data that we use with AI techniques so that we can go to the customers and tell them, "Take me, because I can give you more ROIs, return on investment, on your media campaign spend, and higher conversion," okay? And we can literally prove that to you.
So that business is growing very nicely because of the data that we use in the background, and we have our own DSP, as they call it, logic, in the sense of how you would to whom you would advertise what. Okay? So we are omnichannel, as I mentioned. We have close partnerships, like, for example, with Google, okay? Very important to have these close partnerships, because, as you know, in January, definitively, the cookies are going to disappear, okay? And what's going to happen when cookies disappear? That all the people that don't have primary data, as they say, are not going to be able to do digital merchandising anymore. They are not going to recognize anymore who's coming to them. So what's coming to the forefront very quickly is who has primary data, okay? Who has primary data?
Google, because they collect all the intent and the searches, Facebook has it, and we have it as well, okay? So for us, it is a big opportunity to further strengthen this proposition, okay? So then, and obviously, you need a very specialized team to do that, because this is not about really, truly distribution, this is about digital, media, okay, and digital advertising, really. So why is this so interesting? Because we talked about the inventory of attributes, you know? So what we are solving together with our customers in the ACRS is the decomposition of your offering, okay? Well, what problem... But it creates a whole, I would say, chain effect or chain reaction on all the other solutions around it, okay, that also need to be able to work with attributes and along the attribute model, okay?
So we will have to have the property management systems able to, when you come to the hotel, to deal with which attributes you bought, okay? And by the way, and you would already have reserved the room in advance in that new model. It's not that they, at property level, they will assign you the room. That will be already prebooked because it will have that set of combination of attributes that you chose, okay? So then, that's one. Revenue management we'll have to change. Why? Because now you are not revenue management a room anymore, okay? You have to revenue manage a combination of attributes, which is a completely different problem, and probably you want to do that dynamically, depending on who comes to you. And here's the problem: how do I know, beyond my loyalty base, who's coming to me?
And you know who does it better than anybody else? These guys. These guys that are in the digital advertising industry, like Google and so on, they say, they claim, that with six signs of you, they are almost able to bring it down to you individually in an anonymous way, who you are, okay? So these techniques that are able to recognize who's coming, go back to the inventory, check if it's available, then dynamically price it, and then push back an advertising or an offering in an insight way, and all that, which is what the digital advertisers do in 100 milliseconds, that's what the technology needs to be able to do in a concerted way. So as you can imagine, without having that in the cloud, integrated with consistent data models, it's impossible that this will fly, okay? Because that's the next problem that's coming, okay?
As we solve the attributes, we're going to use AI techniques, okay, like these guys do, to deal with the massive amounts of data that will be there, search intents, whatever, enable, and the signs that are coming in to be able to adapt the offering. That is what state-of-the-art digital merchandising really means, okay? Across any channel, recognizing who you are. And by the way, you may be there as a business traveler that just needs a head and bed, a breakfast, and a parking lot, or you may be there with your family over the weekend. So they need to be able to understand who you are in those two different instances as well, okay?
So this is why we not only do this business, which is a good business to have, is because it's a placeholder for us to move into the realm of demand, modern retailing, okay? So then, let's move on. So what's behind digital advertising? What's behind having intelligent solutions? BI. So we have today, again, here. By the way, in digital media, we are the industry leaders in the world today. We're Google's largest partner in hospitality, okay? In the hospitality digital media. Now, in BI, we are also the market leader, okay? We provide today three, oversimplified, three different solutions. But again, this is changing as we speak. This is also a dynamic environment, okay? So what do we do?
This was originally conceived as a business to help the hoteliers understand the demand position versus a peer, an anonymous peer, okay, and to be able to price themselves, okay? So what we do is for the biggies that have sophisticated revenue management systems, we inject this data real time into the revenue management systems, okay, so that they can take the price decisions, but for the not-so-sophisticated, what they do is they have dashboards, okay? By the way, a GenAI use case is for these ones. We're introducing GenAI on top, so when you don't need any more to ask, "Give me the price for this or the graph for that," you just will talk to them through GenAI. We're launching that this month as we speak, okay? With GenAI, because it's so much easier to consume.
You will ask GenAI, "Can you tell, please tell me what, how's my occupancy versus my peers, and does my rate, sort of be, look okay, or shall I go up, or should I go down?" Okay? So then, the first module today is centered around giving the combination of rates and forward-looking demand so that they can sort of price themselves properly. The second one is one where we give them insights into what the agencies are buying in terms of hotel content, okay? And also the corporations, by the way, okay? We aggregate the content from all GDS. We go even beyond the GDS channels to collect, so we have a full, comprehensive view, okay?
And then they can look with that, okay, which agency is buying more or less, or which corporate is buying which sort of hotel content, so that I can negotiate with them my deals, okay? And the third one is Demand360, which is the forward-looking, up to 1-year forward-looking demand, and we collect this data from PMSs, from the inventories, from the OTAs, so from many, many different providers, okay? So here, for these three solutions, we have a very broad ecosystem of data providers so that we can operationalize this. So what's the future of this? Well, Sylvain described that we are doing a data mesh, and because data centricity is becoming so important, we're moving all this to this new architecture, and we'll bring in data that Amadeus already has today, like air data, okay? But we want to, let's say, operationalize even more data.
I think Sylvain mentioned that, okay? So we want to create data from what we see in the ecosystem, and through that, create new models. Okay? So, for example, I will give you an example. We have started going, like two years ago, to the tourism organizations of the world, the tourist offices, the, what we call the destination management organizations and the convention centers. They love this stuff, okay? Because what they say is, "I don't want to know, let's say, hotel pricing. Give me how I look compared to my competing destinations, okay? And I will define for you what I believe are competing destinations." Then we help them maybe and tell them, "It's this is not your competing set. It's maybe a different one." Okay, but then they... For example, Dubai, who has artificially moved up-...
Tourism from nothing, okay, is one of our premier customers, and is one of the most sophisticated DMOs in the world. They are one of our closest customers in moving this stuff, okay? So then we help them, so DMOs, for example, okay? And you could expand that to many other players in the industry, okay? So then, and by the way, Dubai also wants, buys digital media from us, okay? Why? Because since they know, say, "Okay, you know what's going on, well, I believe that you can do a better digital campaign for me than anybody else." Okay, so then, what's our architecture and product vision? Okay, and I'm coming to the end, okay. So first of all, we talked about cloud-based and obviously open. We are today open. We are quite modularized.
I would say almost we are too open, too modularized, because as I mentioned before, many of these products are best of breed and first category in their own sort of realm, okay? What we need is to create more synergies. Let me give you an example of that synergy. Well, BI goes across, evidently, okay? But for example, the event thing that I described, Delphi, okay? So then today, it's not yet fully integrated into the CRS, okay? So what are we doing now? We're going to integrate that, okay? So whenever an event is organized, okay, it immediately will look at the inventory to see the availability of the rooms and then block the rooms automatically, okay? Today, this is done as a complete separate process with manual intervention, so we will automate that.
Especially when you go into the micro meeting, real-time, booking sort of type, booking that I described before for small meetings, you need to have that real-time connectivity into the inventory. So that's one of the synergies, for example, okay? So then how do we organize ourselves? We mentioned data consistency and data centricity. So that's what's in the core, okay? What's the core? Is the ACRS in a nutshell, okay? It's the inventory that holds all that stuff. Plus another one, which is the guest profiles. We need to have the guest profiles centralized. Let me give you an anecdote, and hopefully you're not too angry at me. Do you know why hotels don't greet you with your name and tell you, "Welcome back," by your name?
Because they don't know in their guest profile whether you are really you or you are somebody else, because the guest profiles are all over the place between the property and the central. How are you going to do digital merchandising and loyalty management, okay, if all your guest profiles are all over the place, okay? So then, very important, this core. We have different capabilities or different products or different modules built around that in a consistent manner. That's our journey. That's what we are doing today, okay? For example, for Demand Generation , we mentioned guest campaigns. This is the guest management module that we have in iHotelier, the meta and the digital advertising that we mentioned, the connectivity there, the GDS, the channel managers. There are many independent channel managers that we're connecting to. It's a very...
I mean, this is like the wild forest. And then the OTA direct connects, okay? All the big OTAs want to be directly connected because they claim it gives them a better conversion to here, so we connect them then to our content as well, okay? Similar problem statement that Decius was mentioning. They don't want to do it themselves. They tell us, "You aggregate the content for me." That's what that is. So then, insights and operational reporting. That's what we mentioned, these new modules that we're doing with Marriott, for example, and our core operational reporting. BI, we talked about that. IT, the payment gateway. David Doctor after me, well, after lunch, really, will talk about what we're doing in payment. For us, Outpayce is going to be our gateway into the payment world, okay? And David will explain you why and how that works, okay?
Then sales and events, that's Delphi, as we mentioned. Service optimization is HotSOS. And then we have our PMS and the PMS gateway that I mentioned before, because if a chain is multi PMS, by definition, we need to be able to connect to the different sort of PMSs in the world. And it's a very fragmented ecosystem, as you know. I mean, we mentioned more than 100 PMSs in the world, okay? And then for guest interaction, guest loyalty, the web, and the booking engine that we provide today, and the call center. We're working on a new gen call center with some of the big IT providers that are specialized in the field worldwide, okay? So then all this is, as I mentioned, the partner ecosystem with APIs, what's all what Sylvain explained, that the same concept. We're piggybacking, by the way, on the Aviation Platform , okay?
So everything that the Aviation Platform can do for us, we will adapt and piggyback. Why? Because it gives us an opportunity to take advantage of that investment and not replicate it ourselves, number one. Second, it's very important that we connect the different ecosystems. So if we are talking of transversalizing use cases, and Decius was describing airline and airport, two ecosystems that have traditionally been working in silos, okay, to the frustration of the traveler, actually, okay, and we are trying to bring that together. Why are we excluding the hotels from that, okay? If there is a disruption situation, why wouldn't you be able to bring reservations automatically into that and not even having, let's say, the customers or the travelers to deal with a check-in, okay? Why is that not. Today, technically, it's possible, okay? So why can't we enact that, okay?
So the idea, therefore, is to piggyback on the common infrastructure here, and as new data get created, to piggyback on that, as I mentioned before, okay? With that, I think this is my last slide, okay? So we see a lot of potential for growth, okay, here. So where do we want to grow? First of all, some of our solutions, as I mentioned before, and I gave you a few examples, we want to move from the high enterprise customers more to the mid-market, no? Delphi, for example, and HotSOS. Okay? So we see a lot of like, or for example, digital media, who is more on the mid. We are now working on bringing it more to the enterprise area. So it's a whole sort of opportunity for us to cross-sell more between the segments, okay?
We can go into new customer segments. We already see that. An example is the DMOs, complete new industry, okay? So we can do that, and we can go with BI beyond. Why wouldn't we go tomorrow to airlines, for example, okay? If we have something to offer, okay? We can grow geographically. Today, still, because of our origins, we are a, a relatively strong North America business, okay? So we see a lot of opportunity in Europe and especially in Asia. And this is, for example, why the Accor deal is so interesting. Why? Because Accor happens to be the largest chain in Europe and in Asia, okay? And we believe that that will bring us a lot of credibility with many other players in those markets, okay? And then the last one is, as I said, deeper integration of this wheel that you saw before.
A lot of opportunity to integrate all these things much better, okay? So then, we have a leadership position in the industry. We talked about the fragmentation, the spaghetti, as I call it, in a, let's say, colloquial way, okay? This is a huge industry with very, very promising future. By the way, very profitable. They even claim that, you know, they have this revenue per available room, sort of KPI that they use or this average daily rates that they use, because demand outpacing the offering side, they project, like over the next five to six years, an increasing ADR, okay? So prices in hotels will not go down, they will continue to go up. That's the current prediction, okay? So then, so we are very confident in the industry, let's say, so we are—that's why we are investing.
By the way, as Luis mentioned, we are today investing heavily into these big projects with Marriott and Accor, but we will only see the revenue through the transactions when they become operational, no? Starting mid-next year, but the migrations of these massive amounts of properties that they have, no? Marriott, 8,500. Accor, another, I think it's 5,500 properties. These are massive amounts, so these, let's say, migrations take also quite a while, okay? And then synergies from product integration, and then the integrated platform. And the addressable market, as we see that, by the way, I would even say it's almost a conservative vision, because it's what we do today, not counting all, some of the new things that I was mentioning, going beyond DMOs and all that, okay? It's EUR 13.6 billion, okay?
Roughly, in terms of opportunity. So we are small today compared to that, no? Okay. Our market shares today, compared to this 500,000 opportunity, still continue to be very small today. So there's a lot of upside for us.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is David Doctor. I head up the payments business at Amadeus. I am also CEO of Outpayce, a wholly owned subsidiary created in 2023 to consolidate all our payments activities, and also as a vehicle to apply for an e-money license. What I'm gonna do in this session is I'm going to run you through how we see at Amadeus, the travel payments opportunity. I'm gonna talk about what we do and give you a little bit of an idea of the size of the opportunity. And I wanna, I want you to take away not only that size of the opportunity, but why we believe Amadeus is well placed to address that opportunity. So with that, I'm gonna start off by giving some context.
You heard today, this morning, my colleagues talking about the digital transformation that's happening right across the whole travel industry. And then Amadeus is there, enabling that transformation at every point, from search, to booking, to ordering, to delivery of the service, and then finally, at the stage of loyalty. And what you'll find is that payments is present at all the way along that traveler journey. When you're booking and ordering, you pay. When you turn up at the airport, you often have to pay for ancillary services, such as baggage. When you're in flight, you pay for your food and beverage. When you turn up at the hotel and you check out, you pay.
Even at the stage of loyalty, payments is present, because often, loyalty points are used as currencies to pay for further travel experiences with those travel providers. Offering a smooth payment experience is very important for the travel players to be successful at closing sales, because if the payment fails, so do your sales. So what do we do at Amadeus? At Amadeus, we have around—like, currently in payment space, we have around 52,000 customers. Around 100 airlines, a little bit more than 100 airlines, a little bit more than 2,000 travel intermediaries. You heard Desi talking about travel intermediaries. We talk about online travel agencies, aggregators, and travel agents in the traditional sense of the word, and also over 50,000 hotel properties. And we do two things for those travel customers.
One is we help them receive payments. So through an orchestration layer, we're connecting them to an ecosystem of payment providers and services, that allows them to simplify their connectivity and access all the payment services that they need. And then on the other side, we help travel intermediaries to pay for the content that they have purchased from travel service providers on behalf of their consumers. So those are the two things we're doing. And, before I go into... I'll go into a little bit more detail, exactly what we're offering and what we're doing in those later on in the presentation. But now what I'd like to do is give some overview of, you know, what are the challenges, and why do businesses need help with payments in the digital world?
Because what we're talking about is digital payments. So what's important? First, in terms of when you're selling in the digital world, you need to ensure you have the right payment method. So you need to have the payment option that your consumer is happy to use to make the sale, the one that he prefers, the one that is trusted for them, and the one that is the one where he has availability to be able to make the purchase. Not only do you need to have the right payment solution for your consumer, you also need to ensure that the payment transaction is authorized, it doesn't fail. And that's beh...
Because what's happening behind, there's a whole processing that goes through from the payment issuer, or who issues the method, the method of payment. Then there's a bank or a merchant that's receiving money, and that payment needs to be authorized and settled later down the process. That can fail for many reasons. It can fail because because one of the parties think, "Okay, it's not a valid payment request." Could be because of fraud. They're worried about that, so they block the payment, or it could fail because they're simply times out along the connectivity that you may have with the payment service providers.
On top of that, there's a complexity of businesses having to keep up with the challenges of security, such as PCI compliance, second-level authentication, that typical experience we all have when you receive an SMS to verify your identity, and if it's a valid payment. And also the changing environment of regulation in all the different countries that you may be operating. And you need to be able to do that in a way that is efficient, not only in the selling process, but also when you come to reconcile payments, and you need to deal with payment failures or even disputes on the back end. So you need to be able to process your payments, receive your payments in an efficient way. And these are the main challenges businesses face when they are facing collecting digital payments.
Now, tied to that, in the travel world, there are additional challenges. Travel is inherently global. Just imagine a mid-size airline. A mid-size airline will travel to more or less around 25 locations, a large one to over 100. That means you need to be able to sell and receive payments in all those territories. If you're flying to 100 countries, you need to sell your product and receive payments in 100 countries. Multiple countries mean multiple currencies, multiple regulations, multiple payment options, because you need to offer the payment option that is prevalent, which used mostly in each one of those countries. So it's not only the main payment options such as Visa, Mastercard, although that everyone generally offers.
You need to also offer the local payment solutions, such as RuPay in India or Barclaycard here in the UK or Carte Bleue in France, or Dankort in Denmark. That creates a big challenge in keeping up to pace with all the local needs that you need to have to be appropriate to have an appropriate experience for your traveler in each one of those territories. So not only do you have the challenge of operating on a global scale in travel, there are very specific use cases. So, for example, when you're booking an airline, you'll book and you'll pay, you'll pay for a ticket, but you're gonna be traveling a little bit later.
And what happens with that is that there are often lots of changes of itinerary, additional services added to your itinerary, and they have to be paid for using normally the same payment method. Not only do you have that type of challenge, you also have the challenges of offering a payment solution linked with a proprietary currencies. The loyalty points is a proprietary currency of the airline, and you see that slider, yeah? Where you can go from points to cash. That is very particular to the travel industry, yeah. You don't find those type of situations elsewhere. And then also, you have these particular flows in the hospitality business, which are very particular to the hospitality business. We've all been to a hotel.
When you book a hotel, you often have to give a credit card as a guarantee, and then when you arrive at the property, what happens is that they take a pre-authorization with your card, and then they charge your stay when you check out. If I compared that to a standard retail environment, where many of the transversal payment providers are modeling their flows against, I, that's very different. I can describe that to you. Imagine I use that flow for when you're going to shop in a supermarket. Before you enter the supermarket, they say, "Hold a moment. We need a card to guarantee payment, so don't enter." Yeah.
Then you go in, you give them your card, so you go in, and you're about to pick up your shopping trolley, and the security guy goes, "Oh, hold a moment, I need a pre-authorization on your card." Okay? Swipes your card, pre-authorization, EUR 200. Wow, I'm not going to spend EUR 200. Then you go around the shop, you pick up all your goods, you check out, and at the checkout, the person checking you out says, "Okay, sir, sir or madam, we're gonna charge the card that you pre-authorized when you came into the store." You can see that's a very, that's a, that would be a very unusual experience, but it's a commonplace experience for the hospitality business, and that's why travel payments can be very different with very different use cases.
If you go on in the travel industry, there's the complexity of integration into the proprietary selling applications and systems that exist in travel. Amadeus, we serve the travel industry with a lot of those systems. So you need to be able to integrate into the passenger service systems that Decius was talking about earlier. You need to be able to integrate into the computer reservation systems that Paco was talking about earlier, and the property management systems of each one of the properties. So that integration often is complex and can be costly for travel merchants to achieve. And finally, the travel industry has its own trade associations and own regulations that are set up by groups such as IATA, International Air Transport Association.
Yes, IATA, which is an association of airlines, which you probably know a lot about. And they have their own rules about settlement, reporting, and the transfer of funds that the airlines need to comply with. And you also have proprietary schemes. So there's a scheme. A scheme is, you know, the big payment companies that offer the infrastructure, such as Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Diners, JCB. That's what we call the schemes, and often you will hear the terms the scheme rails. Well, there's a proprietary scheme for the travel industry called UATP, which is owned by basically a conglomerate of airlines, okay?
So this is very specific to the travel, travel industry, and, when, when travel merchants work in the travel industry, they have to take all these, this into account to be successful when addressing their travel, their travelers' payment needs. So what do we do at Outpayce? At Outpayce, we're processing today around EUR 160 billion through our prepayment applications for our customers. That was the number in 2023. This year, it's growing. It grows significantly each year as we are growing our businesses, and that's one through the merchant services businesses, which is the pay-in business, which I referred to earlier on as the orchestration layer.
What we do, we connect our airline customers typically to around 450 acquiring banks around the globe, 20 payment service providers offering different types of services that allow our customers to do fraud checks, chargeback management, all those types of processes you need to do when you are processing payments digitally. Around 300 alternative payment methods and local payment methods that I was talking about earlier on. Those UPIs, RuPays, Dankort, Cartes Bleues, but also the typical payment methods such digital payment, alternative payment methods such as PayPal, Alipay, Google Pay, Apple Pay. Every year, there's a new one that's being made available, and we need to make available to our travel player customers so that they can have the latest options available for their travelers....
On the payout services, we are helping them pay for the content using virtual cards for payments, prepaid virtual cards that are issued via our issuing partners. So we have, in total, 6 issuing partners, and we're growing on more issuing partners each and every month. And we offer 14 card types and 46 different currencies, so that our travel intermediaries can pay the hotels, LCCs, car companies, and full service carriers for the content that they are purchasing and then reselling on to their travelers or even to other travel intermediaries. We have around 750 travel payment experts in Outpayce, distributed in Europe, Middle East, Africa, principally, and they're also in APAC and the Americas.
Currently, we have R&D centers in Madrid, Barcelona, Nice, Istanbul, and Bangalore. Bangalore being our largest development center today. We connected up to an ecosystem of partners that help us offer the right solutions to our travel service provider customers and our travel intermediary customers. So what's different? Now, you're probably asking, "Well, why don't our customers just work with someone like Adyen?" I got that question in one of the coffee breaks. Well, you know, why are we going to be more successful? Well, one is because why we believe we're going to be successful is, one, that is that, first, we benefit from being a part of the Amadeus group, Amadeus family.
We therefore are able to understand specifically our customers' use cases and needs, and we can integrate into their end-to-end applications at the selling end and also at the reconciliation end, which creates a better end-to-end experience. Secondly, we have a unique perspective on what's important for them, and we focus on resolving their problems specifically. Yeah. If you remember those use cases I talked about before, which are very specific to travel, yeah, we are very aware of those use cases, and we're able to make a difference and, and, for example, combine loyalty points with cash as a form of payment, okay? Because that's just a sophisticated foreign exchange problem, where the loyalty points is just another currency, like a...
And you can use it, as if it was a foreign exchange, another foreign exchange, transaction. But you need to be able to understand exactly, and have connectivity to those loyalty systems as if you were having connectivity to other, other, payment rails. On top of that, unique perspective, as I said before, we have the integration to the IT systems, and what we're able to do is we're able to work with both, as we're working both with the merchants and the travel intermediaries, we're able to use the data to optimize the payment acceptance. Now, payment acceptance is a really key challenge in the payments world. Typically, you'll see that on average, there's around 15% failure of payment acceptance, okay? And then on the international level, that can be even more challenging.
It can get up to around 30%. And our payment acceptance, we pride ourselves on our payment acceptance levels. Our payment acceptance levels are around 95%. And why is that? Well, recently, an airline, a Middle Eastern airline, migrated to our payment server. Prior to being a part of our payment server, they were having international acceptance rates of just over 70%. Yeah. So a really high failure rate on the international payment. So that, when I say international payments, I mean a purchase against a card that isn't a card that was from the country where the airline is. Hmm. And what... The day after they migrated to us, their acceptance rate went up to over 95%. Why was that possible?
Because what we're able to do is capture the data that the issuers require, the issuer of the card, for example, in the U.S., to recognize that this payment request is a legitimate payment request and not a fraudulent one. Integration is key to be able to capture the data, and we make it easy for our customers to get capture of data. So that's the example why we believe we are best placed to be able to help our customers resolve those payment challenges in the travel world. So what do we. I'm going to go into the portfolio now. So what do we exactly do with the Xpay, with our merchant orchestration layer? We call it the Xpay platform. And effectively, what we are offering is a connectivity to a host of payment services that we offer or our partners offer....
Okay, so we come at this from a technology perspective, okay? So we're—I like to describe ourself, us, as a TechF in rather than a fintech from that perspective, 'cause we're technology first. And we are looking to add value where we're strongest, which is in understanding our customer and using our technology capabilities to resolve their particular problems. So we've—we do offer a connectivity to all those payment service providers I talked about before, those acquiring banks, et cetera. And we also offer the services that help them reduce the costs of acquiring because of security standards. For example, 3DS verification, which is that second-level verification of identity that you receive when you have your SMS, or sometimes it can be through, even now, WhatsApp or something. You can actually do it through many different channels today.
And the other type of solutions we offer are tokenization. Tokenization has a major effect on the reduction of costs for digital payments, okay? Today, we operate on scale, our tokenization solutions. In our token vault, we have 650 million live credit cards today in our token vault. That's... When you think about that, you know, very few banks even issue 650 million cards. So, you know, we're working at the top end of working at scale already with the solutions we do. But we're focusing in on those things where we can make a difference, which is on the technology end. So we're offering a technology solution, and we're not taking on the risk of acquiring, for example, for airlines.
We leave that to our banking partners, who know how to manage the risk and offer those solutions to our customers. But we're giving easy access and the technology that our customers need to operate in a digital environment. So by design, the Xpay platform is open. You heard Sylvain talking earlier about us having an open architecture. By design, the Xpay platform is open. Our customers can customize on top, and our ecosystem partners can connect to it themselves using the open API. So it makes it very easy for them to access our customers, and our customers to access the ecosystem of fintech solutions that we offer through our partner network.
So with one connection, effectively, our merchant customers can get access to an orchestration and control of their payment flows, and easy access to the data that they require to create a seamless and improved digital experience when it comes to payments. Our business model is transactional. So we charge our merchant customers a transaction fee. 90% of our revenues are recurring as a result of that. And we also charge our partners for connectivity to the world of our customers. So normally, that's a connectivity fee, and they pay the value that they receive.
So some customers, we help them deploy or commercialize those solutions, and we get a revenue share from those customers, or as those partners, sorry, on the other side, where we're helping them commercialize those solutions to our customers. So that's it for the merchant services. And now I'm gonna talk about what we call the B2B Wallet solution, which is the platform we use to help our intermediary customers, travel intermediary customers, pay for content that they purchase. So the B2B Wallet is what we call it, as I said before, is an orchestration platform that that connects up virtual issuers and is integrated into the selling interfaces of our travel intermediary customers.
It works with the GDS, it works with the hotels, selling platforms, and it also works with other proprietary booking systems, such as self-booking tools, et cetera. And what we're doing there, we're effectively enabling the use of a virtual card to pay for that content. Now, typically, the problem that happens, and why do they use this, is that when you are a travel intermediary, to reserve for content and to guarantee content, you need to make a payment. So you make an order, you need to make a payment. Yeah. If you have to book a car, you make a payment or you guarantee a payment with a card, for example, okay?
If you book a low-cost carrier, you need to pay for the low-cost carrier to guarantee that content. And that means you have a lot of fragmented payments to be made. You can't make the payments in bulk to those providers, you know, like, off invoice. So that brings an operational challenge for them, and they have to do that real time. Because they have to have the confirmation of the payment at the time that they're also selling to their consumer customer and receiving payment from them... So this is why using the virtual cards is very interesting, because what we're able to do is generate a virtual card for each transaction, for a limited amount, and then we can kill the card at the end of the transaction. Now, why do we do that?
We do that because that reduces fraud. When you have fraud, effectively, the fraud comes from the use of cards for for illegitimate transactions. So someone gets hold of your number and then goes and use it for their own purposes. If you produce a card number. Now, these are, I call them cards, but these are literally just numbers that we use inside an application, okay? You've heard about the 16 BIN, 16-digit PAN number. That's what's called a card, effectively. That's what a virtual card is, nothing more than that. It obviously associated to a IBAN number, an account, and a funded account, okay? However, a card, a virtual card is nothing more than a number, but you can do it, that's recognized by a scheme, and you can do a payment against that.
The schemes that we use, we use Mastercard, we use Visa, and we use American Express. And we do actually do some issuance against UATP as well, okay, in some particular cases. We have as our issuing partners, we have Barclays, Nium, Apiso, ConnexPay. Citi isn't there, but we also have Citi. And we're adding more. We'll be adding more this quarter to address other geographies. Essentially, what we do, we choose the partners based on two things. One, the geographies to cover, because where they are licensed and permitted to issue cards, and also the products they offer, in currencies, if they offer credit or prepaid, et cetera.
We're choosing partners to be able to have a wider choice of products for our financial products for our intermediary customers. The business model on this is two-sided. So essentially, where... You know, how do we generate money? Effectively, what we're getting a rebate of the interchange fee that our issuing partners are getting. And then we share part of that rebate with our travel intermediary customers, okay? So effectively, the rebates that we are getting, they're set as a part of the contract, and they're volume connected. The more volume we do, the more rebate we get from a particular partner.
Going forward, when we, as an e-money license, which I'll talk about in a second, we will be—we'll be collecting directly the interchange fee. And those interchange fees are set by the schemes themselves, based on territory, type of transaction, the industry, because the price of the interchange fee is set by basically a rate card that each scheme publishes. Okay? And it's different on those type of factors. Recently, we purchased Voxel. Voxel was an acquisition we did to enhance our proposition, particularly to address non-air content with our intermediary customers. What do they do? Because effectively, they allow for invoice collection electronically, and you close loop it with a payment with a payment transaction.
So for example, when you check out of the hotel, the hotel issues an invoice, and then the intermediary makes a payment back to the hotel, and it's all settled automatically. We feel this is a great opportunity to address greater non-air spend, particularly in the hotels, cars, and cruise lines. And also expand our services into other verticals, which I'll talk about a little bit more as I talk about the logic of what Voxel does and also what we're doing as an EMI regulated entity. So, when we purchased Voxel, they're already market leader in e-invoice collection in the travel industry. Effectively, they are connected to all around 80 PMS systems.
That's how they collect out the invoices. They also connected. They're generating a digital invoice, so they'd also connected to around 50 tax authorities, okay? So they can post the digital invoice with the tax authorities. And they're working with over 1,000 travel intermediaries, you know, with some big names, such as Booking.com, such as Hotelbeds, the TUI Group, tour operators, for example. They're working with those type of travel intermediaries, which aggregate content and have to pay for content, and collect invoices against those payments. We see a very strong opportunity for synergy, because they have they effectively offer three platforms, the e-invoicing platform, the called baVel Invoice .
They also have baVel Pay, which is a very similar solution to our B2B Wallet, as a platform, which allows for some synergetic opportunities in terms of connectivity for us. And then the third platform is baVel Procurement , which is a procurement platform that they offer to hotel properties to make orders to food and beverage suppliers of those hotel properties. It's something we believe we can also offer to our hotel properties going forward in the future. Voxel will also help us address the corporate market, which is really important for our future growth, because we believe there's a lot of opportunity in addressing corporate interest spend and corporate pre-trip spend, and I'll talk about that a little bit forward in terms of our growth opportunities.
In terms of becoming a regulated entity, why have we chosen to do that? First one, I already described, we want to get access to the interchange fee, where it makes sense, where we can address certain use cases that we can't address just through our partners. Second element, what it will allow us to do is, it allows us to also to do open banking. And what that exactly means, open banking, it means effectively, you can consolidate information from third party, financial information from third party. You need to be regulated to do that.
When we will do that, we'll be able to use the data from our third-party issuers and also our own issuing data and consolidate that together to give a better experience to our customers, but also use that data to improve acceptance, which is really, really important in terms of the acceptance of the prepaid card, virtual cards, but also the other way around in terms of acceptance on the acquiring side. And finally, it'll allow us also to address other types of opportunities in terms of payment methods, for example, wallet-to-wallet payments. So to go beyond what are virtual issuance of virtual cards and do the typical wallet to wallet.
So when you initiate a bank, an instant bank payment, you need to be regulated to be able to do that and to be connected to the bank clearing houses. As a regulated entity, we'll be able to do that. We have been granted a license by the Bank of Spain, and we'll be passporting that across the European Economic Area. So that means we'll be able to offer those services with that across the whole of the EU and the countries that are associated within the European Economic Area. So let's talk about the opportunity. I'm coming to an end now, so very quickly, I want to talk about the opportunity in terms of addressable market.
We are sizing the addressable market for the things that we do, for the things I have spoken about. When we talk about the size of the addressable market, we talk about it in net revenue terms, and we're estimating this is around EUR 6.1 billion. What do I mean by net revenues? I mean revenues less the variable costs, such as rebate costs, et cetera, and what is basically net revenues. Around 40% of that is coming from the merchant services, the orchestration layer, and around 60% of that is coming from the B2B wallet payment services. How do we-- We're small now, but we generate a significant amount of business, but we're still small, and we're on a growth path.
We're doing the growing by offering what we do already to more of our airline customers, for example. We are also growing by doing more B2B wallet types of solutions for our intermediary customers in Europe, but also beyond. We're expanding geographically, and that's why we're adding issuing partners also to be able to address new territories as we go across, particularly in the Americas and Asia Pacific. We're also upselling services to our merchants, our merchant customer, such as FX solutions. We offer them what is multi-currency pricing today, for example. We see that as a great growth opportunity because it gives our airline customers the capability on earning on FX spreads money, and we can enable them to do that.
And, we'll soon be offering also DCC, which is dynamic currency conversion, capabilities to our portfolio. We are the only payment service provider that operates across all airline channels, indirect, direct, NDC, online digital channels, at the airport. And we are also Offer and Order compliant and also NDC compliant today. So we can address the legacy flows and the future flows already, which is, you know, one of the great advantages we see. As we see the retail trends being adopted by our customers, we're able to enable them to adopt also, Offer and Order flows, from a payments perspective. We do want to expand into new verticals. We're expanding into hospitality, as you heard from Paco.
We already have enabled one of our major ACRS customers, and we are also enabling iHotelier customers. We just started in Mexico, and we're rolling out across Europe also, payment services for the iHotelier customers. And we also expanding the use of B2B Wallet with the Voxel capabilities embedded in self-booking tools for corporations. We're starting with Cytric, but we'll be offering that to other third-party self-booking tools as well in the future. As I said, with the e-money license, we're going to be self-issuing cards in Europe and addressing particular use cases as a result of that.
There are other growth opportunities that will be open to us that isn't included in the EUR 6.1 billion addressable market, such as applying for licenses beyond Europe to be able to do issuing, for example, in other territories, and also addressing acquiring, which we can do with our license as well, in low risk types of use cases, such as card present, for example, in hospitality. When you're checking out, that's a very low risk because effectively the service is being delivered. The other area which is low risk is at the airport, because you pay for bags when you're putting your bags onto the plane. So effectively, that's low risk. So we're looking to...
Studying the possibility to address low risk acquiring opportunities in the future. And needless to say, we'll continue investing in building out that marketplace and ecosystem of partners and connectivity to more and more travel players, so that they can take advantage of all the fintech innovations that are happening across the globe. So in short, our ambition is to become the reference for travel payments by enabling both our customers and our payments service providers to work together and take out the complexity of doing payments in travel. In short, by making travel simply paid. Thank you very much.
Okay, so that's the last part of the day. I need to translate everything that you have heard into numbers. So, a couple of comments before we go to the outlook. I mean, this is not my plan, or the finance plan, this is the company plan. Of course, we'll try to do better than that, but this is where we are at this stage. And secondly, I mean, we are providing you with an outlook up to 2026, because we need to limit at one point in the years. However, there is no reason to think that in the following years, we should not be able to achieve at least the figures that we are providing you. Mainly because we keep investing in some areas where the return will come later.
And even some of the customers that we have been able to sign and announce will not have an impact, mainly, the impact will be after 2026. So 2027 already has traction with some of these signatories. So let's go to the plan. I will use my notes. I don't want to really be wrong with the numbers. Well, mainly this is what you have seen, the EUR 41 billion. So how this was adding up in the potential market that we are addressing today, we cover in the different presentations. And if we move to the outlook, we are expecting our revenues to grow 9%-12% for this period, 2023-2026. EBITDA margin expanding, excluding cloud costs, and a broadly stable EBITDA margin, including cloud costs over the period.
We also expect an expanding EBITDA margin as we continue to advance and complete our migration to the cloud. Our R&D expense is expected to grow low- to mid-single-digit during this period, and these dynamics will result in solid and consistent free cash flow generation, sorry, generation during these three years. Air distribution range of revenue, 6%-9%. We expect to see continued steady booking growth, supported by the expansion of content, commercial wins, and growing NDC volumes. The weight of NDC bookings within our total will improve every year from the current single-digit % weight. We also aim to attract volumes processed outside of the GDS. This just explained that low-cost carriers or large third-party volumes . These are, however, lower fee volumes.
Some NDC volumes may also have a lower booking fee attached, as we have discussed in the past, although we expect NDC volumes to bring on average and at constant booking mix, a similar or a slightly higher contribution per booking than our average. As a result of the booking evolution we experienced over the period, the evolution of our revenue per booking will grow and vary depending on the customer booking class and NDC mix. But again, we are guiding you with revenue terms, where we expect to grow in the 6%-9% range. In terms of contribution, we expect the distribution to grow slightly faster than revenues over the period, resulting in small margin expansion. For IT solutions, we expect revenues to grow at 10%-14% over the period.
We'll see organic PB growth, driven by global air traffic, and inorganic PB growth from new customer implementations. Regarding our inorganic PB evolution in 2024, we should expect roughly an incremental 35-45 million PBs from the 2023 and 2024 migrations. For 2025 and 2026 combined, an additional 60-80 million incremental inorganic PBs to the 2024 PBs, resulting from the 2024/2026 migrations that we know of today. We also expect expanding our revenue per, per PB, primarily supported by pricing effects, selling more components related to Altéa and Nevio, and as we create value for customers through Nevio, and from fast-growing airport IT and Expert Airline Services revenues.
We expect our margins in Airline IT to dilute a bit over the period as a result of the Vision-Box consolidation in 2024, as it has a lower margin than the Airline IT margin, as well as from the faster growth we are expecting in services and airport IT, which also have lower margins. For Hospitality and Other Solutions , we expect to grow in a 15%-18% CAGR range, driven by volume growth and new customer additions to our platform in both hospitality and payments. In hospitality, we will see double-digit growth throughout the period, with particularly faster growth at Hotel IT and Media and Distribution . We are expecting payments to deliver higher growth than hospitality over the period, gaining weight in the segment.
In terms of contribution, we expect in hospitality to expand moderately and consistently over the period, supported by our faster growth at our transaction-based business. We are strongly committed to midterm growth, and as we have discussed today, investing in many fronts for the future. Given our shift to the cloud, we are sustaining still our own infrastructure costs and the project cost to migrate. As we approach completion of our cloud project, we should see P&L fixed cost growth moderation in 2025 and 2026. Our fixed cost growth over the period, excluding cloud and M&A, are in line with the pre-COVID figures. In terms of CapEx, we expect to have CapEx ranging between 11%-13% of sales in the coming years, higher in 2024, and with a decreasing trend over the period.
In 2024, we have a number of big implementations in the hospitality area, such as Marriott and Accor, in Airline IT, and in NDC, and we have a lot of activities that support future growth in 2026 and beyond. These costs and CapEx expectations are based on the customer wins we know today. For free cash flow, the key drivers will be the dynamics we have discussed for EBITDA and CapEx, and we expect healthy free cash flow generation throughout the period. We are expecting cumulative generation of free cash flow for 2024 through 2026 to range between EUR 3.9 billion-EUR 4.2 billion. Finally, in terms of shareholder remuneration, our priorities in terms of capital allocation are, firstly, our R&D and CapEx programs. Following this, M&A, that has always formed part of our growth strategy.
We look to M&A to accelerate our time to market and strategies, or to expand into adjacent and synergetic opportunities. Based on our c- credit rating goals, we aim to maintain the 1-1.5 net debt to EBITDA leverage ratio. In terms of shareholder remuneration, we operate an ordinary dividend payout ratio of 40%-50% of our reported profit. Our ordinary dividend payout has grown consistently every year since our IPO up to 2019. Post-pandemic, we resumed our ordinary dividend payment in 2023, and we have also done share repurchase programs in the past to complete our ordinary shareholder remuneration. In early 2024, we completed the share repurchase program, announced in 2023, amounting to EUR 950 million. Considering how we have started the year, we will likely reach the lower end of our target leverage ratio towards the end of 2024.
Absent short-term M&A opportunities, we will likely, at that point, consider complementing our shareholder remuneration with a new share repurchase program. Thanks a lot.