Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Amadeus Q1 2026 results conference call. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. I would now like to turn the conference over to Luis Maroto, President and CEO of Amadeus. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, a very warm welcome to our Q1 2026 results presentation. Thank you for attending today. I'm joined by Carol, our CFO. Let's begin. Please turn to slide 4 for our takeaways from the quarter. Amadeus opened the year with solid growth and profitability following the strong momentum we saw in Q4 last year. In March, the situation in the Middle East resulted in a moderation of our volume evolution, slowing our performance in the quarter. Nevertheless, for Q1, Amadeus posted high single-digit growth at constant currency with good revenue growing 8%, adjusted EBIT increasing by 7% and adjusted diluted EPS expanding by 9%. From March, the developing situation in the Middle East generated disruptions in air traffic in the region, namely origin, destination, and stopover traffic.
This also impacted the bookings associated with this air traffic, primarily through an increase in cancellations. These kind of effects are well-aligned with what we have seen in similar situations in the past. Despite this, our strength in Q1 stemmed from solid momentum in January and February, which continued through March in parts of our businesses. We saw resilience in our business. Traffic accelerated in other parts of the world while rebooking activity also supported revenue growth through different streams. Global air traffic grew 5% over January and February and 2% in March, resulting in 4% growth for Q1. We are closely monitoring the uncertain macro and geopolitical context with a range of impacts, making it difficult to predict in the short term. We do expect to see tempered performance in Q2.
Based on our current assumptions of booking growth recovery in the second half and global traffic growth of 3% in 2026, we are currently expecting to deliver within our outlook for 2026, and we will update the market at the end of July if this changes. Commercial and business momentum remained strong through the first quarter, and we increased our customer base across our segments, expanded the portfolio of solutions adopted by our customers, and cross-sold more solutions across verticals. At Amadeus, we are focused on long-term growth. We invest with conviction for the future. As a leader in travel technology, our goal is to be an orchestrator in an AI-enabled travel ecosystem. 50% of our CapEx is related to product and solution development, which includes AI capabilities and enhancing AI solutions.
We aim to connect suppliers, sellers, and AI assistants to trusted and dynamic data at scale. This has to be done in a neutral, secure, and responsible way. We believe Amadeus will capture value as essential infrastructure powering any new players, including AI players, expanding our role and increasing our relevance. We're pleased to announce last week our intention to acquire IDEMIA Public Security, a world-class, market-leading biometrics technology platform to create seamless end-to-end travel journeys of the future. IPS delivers on our growth ambition and long-term commitment to biometrics as part of our broader platform strategy. It increases the breadth and scale of our offering and makes us more relevant in one of the most transformative technologies for delivering fast, convenient, and secure end-to-end traveler journeys. We are committed to executing on our strategy.
We remain highly confident in the breadth of opportunity ahead and in our growth prospects into the midterm. Let's turn to our strategy and how it translates into commercial wins. Amadeus is leading the airline industry's retailing transformation with Nevio, our AI-native, next-generation airline IT platform. As you know, Lufthansa Group, British Airways, Air France-KLM, Saudia, and Finnair are engaged in Nevio, with 25% of Altéa PBs now involved in a Nevio program. Looking ahead, we see a strong interest across all regions and expect momentum to build beyond Europe. In the quarter, Amadeus continued to grow the scope of solutions adopted by our customers. For example, we were pleased to announce that Southwest Airlines, the largest domestic carrier in the U.S., signed for Amadeus Altéa NDC, becoming the first U.S. airline to do so.
Alaska Airlines, one of the largest U.S. carriers, is in the process of implementing our AI-powered, innovative, modular, and data-driven revenue management technology. We also had new customer signatures for Air IT, including the Bureau of Immigration of the Philippines, London City Airport, and Swissport, among others. Moving on to hospitality, the Amadeus Hospitality platform offers the most comprehensive AI-powered portfolio of core capabilities to the hotel industry, and it is the most broadly connected ecosystem of partners. We are creating a global community platform of world-leading hotels on a mission to transform relationships with guests. We are advancing with Marriott International, Accor, and The Ascott Limited to join our platform.
We are pleased to say that over 1,000 Marriott International properties are live on ACRS, with a meaningful number of additional Marriott properties scheduled to migrate gradually throughout 2026. In the quarter, we had commercial momentum across our hospitality and payment solutions, including, for example, several customer signatures for media and distribution solutions and British Airways implementing Outpayce end-to-end payment orchestrator. As for the Amadeus Travel Platform, which enable travel providers to retail through third parties worldwide, we secure new or renewed distribution agreements, and we enrich our content with the addition of Jet2, among others. We also signed several contracts with travel sellers for content distribution and with several corporations for our SiteUC corporate IT solution. As a demonstration of the interconnection of our solutions, we are pleased to share that an airline has adopted our hospitality digital media solutions for the first time.
Also, Delphi, our market-leading events and catering solution in hospitality, is now supporting a leading U.K. university as well as Premier League stadiums. On the technology front, we remain on track with the commissioning our data center following the completion of our cloud migration last year. We continue to advance our partnerships with Microsoft and Google leveraging AI. agentic AI promises to transform travel in very positive ways, bringing increased personalization to travelers as well as productivity and efficiency gains across the value chain. Amadeus is uniquely placed to deliver agentic AI functionality into products and solutions, supporting our customers on their own journey and to serve as orchestrator in an AI-enabled travel ecosystem. Please turn to slide 6 for our AI milestones this quarter. Amadeus plays a distinctive role within the travel industry. We operate as the embedded neutral execution layer at the core of the travel ecosystem.
We are also the system of record that underpins how travel operates day to day. In this context, we see a clear opportunity for Amadeus to act as the orchestrator, the new players such as digital assistants and AI-driven services rely on to operate effectively within travel. Our technology is deeply integrated into real operational processes, connecting travel suppliers, sellers, and increasingly, AI-enabled interfaces. This depth of integration is what allows AI to move beyond experimentation and operate reliably within real work workflows. Just as importantly, we deliver this at global scale with high levels of reliability, integrity, and trust. This combination of deep integration, scalability, and operational discipline continues to differentiate Amadeus within the industry. During the first quarter, we continue to make progress on our AI strategy with a core focus on embedding AI into concrete operational use cases.
We successfully tested our voice-based agent for airline call centers with an airline. This supports travelers end-to-end, allowing them to change existing flight bookings, review alternative flight options, complete payments, and update their bookings seamlessly without leaving the conversation. It also enables natural multilingual conversations across multiple customer touchpoints. This agentic AI conversational commerce solution is the result of a close collaboration between Amadeus and Microsoft, combining Amadeus technology and travel expertise with Microsoft Azure OpenAI infrastructure. Deploying this type of agentic AI in live customer service environment provides a clear illustration of how AI can deliver practical value when it is deeply integrated into core systems. We are also engaging with Google to jointly explore innovation opportunities to deliver travelers more relevant and context-aware recommendations.
We recently revealed a use case at Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas, showcasing how the combination of Google Cloud, Gemini, Google Maps, and Amadeus can unlock more intelligent and hyper-personalized traveler experiences. In this use case, Amadeus remains responsible for the core recommendation logic and decisioning, while Google Maps is used to enrich results with hyper-local context. With our role as a system of record in travel, Amadeus can provide authorized access to relevant travel content, so it can be integrated seamlessly across platforms like Gemini and Google Maps. We are also evolving Amadeus Hey!, our travel engagement solution for travel sellers, by exploring new agentic AI capabilities. It is designed to deliver connected, responsive, and intuitive experiences across the travel journey. Amadeus Hey! is evolving through collaboration with Amazon Web Services.
As part of this work, we are exploring specialized agents that could understand trip context, anticipate traveler needs, and autonomously complete tasks on the traveler's behalf. For example, with a traveler's consent, a check-in agent could detect when check-in opens and automatically complete this process, applying the traveler's preferences, such as seat preference, and seamlessly delivering a digital boarding pass to the traveler. This quarter, we also launched Lisa, an AI-powered sales assistant, to support hotels interested in using Link Hotel, an Amadeus solution that connects independent hotels to travel sellers through GDSs and aggregators. Lisa enhances Amadeus sales processes from the very first customer interaction by providing instant multilingual responses and guiding prospectus customers through the sales and onboarding processes. This improves response times, consistency, and overall partner experience, increases operational efficiency.
This work demonstrates how an AI can be applied in a practical and responsible way to deliver more relevant real-world travel experiences, and it reinforces Amadeus' central role within the travel ecosystem. We are embedding AI into core traveler processes. Scaling it responsibly and reinforcing our position as the trusted neutral technology backbone and platform of the travel industry. Now we'll pass on to Carol for our financial overview.
Thanks, Luis. In Q1, we saw strong financial performance, delivering high single-digit growth across revenue, adjusted EBIT, and adjusted diluted EPS at constant currency, coupled with steady free cash flow generation. This performance resulted from a strong start to the year across all segments, followed by moderation of volumes in March due to the ongoing Middle East situation. We saw resilience in our revenue streams despite the moderation of volumes, due to the role that we play in providing disruption-related services and processes. In the quarter, foreign exchange effects impacted our results negatively, reducing our revenue, EBIT, and EPS growth. We display our performance versus previous year also at constant currency to facilitate your understanding of Amadeus' underlying financial performance. Revenue amounted to EUR 1,683 million, representing 8% constant currency growth. Reported growth was 3%.
Adjusted EBIT increased to EUR 500 million, equal to 7% growth at constant currency, 5% reported growth. Adjusted diluted EPS expanded by 9% at constant currency. Free cash flow amounted to EUR 274 million, equaling 5% growth. Diluted EPS was EUR 0.83, 5% growth. We deployed R&D investment of EUR 335 million in the quarter, equivalent to 20% of revenue. Leverage was at 1 times net debt to EBITDA at the end of March, and we continue executing on our EUR 500 million share repurchase program. In Q1, our group revenue grew by 3.1% on a reported basis, or by 7.9% at constant currency. Despite the Middle East situation, we delivered growth across all segments. Air IT Solutions delivered a particularly strong performance, growing by 12%.
Hospitality and Other Solutions continued on its trajectory, growing by 9.8%, and Air Distribution delivered 4.6% growth in the quarter. At constant currency, our adjusted EBIT grew 6.6% and adjusted EBIT margin was 29%, 0.4 percentage points below prior year. On a reported basis, adjusted EBIT grew 4.5%, driven by the growth I've just previously described and a cost evolution consisting of the following: Cost of revenue increasing by 4%, fundamentally driven by an increase in transactions in hotel distribution bookings and in payments due to the B2B Wallet expansion, as well as from regional and customer mixes.
Fixed cost growth of 0.2% mostly resulting from higher unitary personnel costs and transaction processing costs from volumes expansion and prior year ramp up in our migration to the cloud, offset by resource decreases following the completion of our migration to the cloud at end of 2025, and cost containment measures in response to the Middle East geopolitical situation. Ordinary D&A expense increased by 7.8% as a result of higher amortization of our internally developed software to continue to maintain our leadership position. Now let's review the performance of our operating segments, starting with our Air IT Solutions business. Air IT Solutions revenue increased strongly in the quarter by 12% at constant currency, driven by Amadeus PBs increasing by 3.1% and a higher revenue per PB of 8.6%.
Revenue per PB experienced strong growth in the quarter, primarily due to PB-linked performance, such as continued upselling of our solutions such as revenue management, digital commerce, dynamic pricing, and Altéa NDC. Incremental revenues from our Amadeus Nevio portfolio, renewals, and inflation. Secondly, transactional non-PB re-linked performance such as digital commerce, Amadeus Ticket Changer, and direct distribution, partly due to an increase in transactions linked to the air traffic disruption caused by the situation in the Middle East. Thirdly, non-transactional performance such as our fast-growing airline professional services. Our PB evolution in the quarter was slightly moderated by the air traffic disruption experienced in some Middle Eastern countries in March due to heightened geopolitical instability in the region. Excluding the MEA region, our PBs grew by 3.9% in the quarter, an acceleration versus prior quarter, partly due to traffic redistribution from the Middle East.
In April, PB growth has slowed relative to growth in March and in Q1, also reflecting some Easter seasonality effects and airline strikes. In Q1, we continued to partner with airlines, airports, and border authorities around the globe. It has also been pleasing to receive positive feedback from our customers, thanking us for our efforts in assisting with their disruption activity during the early stages of the Middle East situation. We continue to see great success with our revenue management solutions. Among others, Azerbaijan Airlines, the national carrier of Azerbaijan, has signed for network revenue management solution and Alaska Airlines, one of the largest U.S. carriers, is in the process of implementing it. We also broadened the scope of solutions adopted by New Skies customers, such as Vueling, that selected Navitaire Edge Shopping and Azul Linhas Aéreas that contracted for the Navitaire Dynamic Pricing.
We expanded our agreements with Air Canada and TAP Air Portugal for professional services. In airport IT, we continued to expand our presence across Asia-Pacific, North America, the Middle East and Europe. Several airports and public authorities in the Philippines, the Middle East and North America will adopt our AI-enabled biometric technologies and London City Airport and Swissport in Europe will adopt airport cloud use service. Now on to hospitality and other solutions. Hospitality and other solutions revenue grew by 9.8% at constant currency in Q1. Revenue growth was driven across both hospitality and payments due to new customer implementations and increased transaction volumes. Within hospitality, the fastest growing solutions were customer implementations of our Amadeus Central Reservations System and hotel distribution. In payments, both our merchant services and our payout services reported strong growth.
We continued our commercial success worldwide, spanning across our portfolio. We signed new agreements with customers such as Visit Hungary, Moonstone Hotel Properties, and El Palace Barcelona for media solutions, and Roomex and Travelers AI for hotel distribution. Demonstrating the interconnection of our solutions, Saudia became the first airline to contract digital media. The University of Warwick and Aramark Sports & Entertainment U.K. selected Delphi. In payments, British Airways implemented Outpayce's end-to-end payment orchestrator. Notably, as well, Etihad Airways and Airlink signed for FX Box, a solution that enables travel companies to control how prices are converted, displayed, and settled across multiple currencies throughout the payment flow. Additionally, Saudia will use Amadeus Professional Services to implement Amadeus payment solutions. We also expanded B2B Wallet customer base with several travel seller signatures. Finally, on to air distribution.
Air distribution revenue increased by 4.6% in Q1 at constant currency, driven by revenue per booking growth of 4.8% in line with what we delivered in Q4 and prior year, resulting from the positive pricing effects such as from renewals, new agreements and inflation. Amadeus bookings declined slightly in the quarter by 0.2%. Whilst our booking performance up to February was strong, accelerating relative to Q4, our March booking evolution was impacted by the Middle East situation. This caused a reduction in air traffic to and from the impacted countries, as well as a deceleration in new bookings and an increase in booking cancellations for routes flying in and out or stopping over the countries involved in the Middle East situation.
We estimate that our bookings grew by close to 4% in the quarter, excluding the Middle East impact. During the quarter, we continued to see commercial gains across the regions. In April, we have seen an improving trend for bookings. While bookings are still below prior year, performance is better than in March as cancellation rates have started to improve. In Q1, we broadened our airline content offering through Amadeus Travel Platform with Jet2.com and Arajet. We signed several contracts with travel sellers for content distribution, including 5 new customers in Greater China and AI Aviation in Malaysia and with several corporations for Cytric Easy such as Baillie Gifford. Now let's move on to R&D.
Our R&D investment amounted to EUR 335 million in the first quarter, equivalent to 20% of our revenue and representing a 6.1% decline relative to prior year, following the completion of migration of our systems to the public cloud at the end of last year. We continue to prioritize investment in R&D to deliver our organic growth, maintaining our leadership position. We are proud of the commitment that we make to remaining relevant for our customers and ensuring that emerging technologies such as AI continue to enrich our entire portfolio. Half of our investment was dedicated to the expansion of our portfolio as well as the evolution of our solutions and AI capabilities, including Amadeus Nevio and Navitaire Stratos for airlines, our hospitality platform, NDC technology for airlines, travel sellers and corporations and solutions for airports and payment services.
A third was dedicated to customer implementations across our business such as Marriott International and Accor for ACRS, new Nevio customers and airline portfolio upselling and customers implementing NDC technology as well as efforts related to bespoke professional services provided to our customers. The remainder was dedicated to our partnerships with Microsoft and Google and the development of our internal technology systems. Capital expenditure also decreased by 15.2%, largely reflecting the completion of the migration of our systems to the cloud and represented 10.5% of revenue. In Q1, we generated EUR 274 million of free cash flow, 4.5 ahead of last year as a result of our EBITDA expansion and lower capital expenditure. This was partially offset by a higher change in working capital outflow and higher interest and tax payments.
Net debt amounted to EUR 2,586 million at the end of March, EUR 445 million higher than at the end of December 2025. Fundamentally due to the acquisition of treasury shares under our share repurchase programs and the dividend payment, as well as the acquisition of SkyLink, which we announced last quarter, and partially offset by our free cash flow generation. Our leverage was 1x net debt EBITDA at the end of March within our targeted leverage range. Please turn to slide 16 for a recap on our views on our outlook and final remarks. Despite the impact from the Middle East situation from March, Amadeus reported a strong performance in the first quarter, demonstrating the resilience of revenue streams not linked to volume.
Our revenue expansion was supported by underlying volume growth beyond the disrupted traffic and the booking cancellation increase, coupled with solid unitary revenue metrics evolution, incremental disruption revenues and healthy performance of our hospitality and payments businesses. In April, the booking evolution has improved, supported by a softening in the level of booking cancellations, although they are still below prior year. The PB trend has, however, decelerated, likely reflecting the slowdown in bookings we saw in March due to the Middle East situation. We are assuming booking growth will be negative in Q2 and PB growth will be weaker than it was in Q1. It is difficult to predict as the situation still remains uncertain. Our PBs in April were also impacted by airline strikes in Western Europe and customer mix.
We are closely monitoring the macro and geopolitical context and are taking a prudent approach with cost containment measures in place. We are currently expecting to deliver within our guided expectations for 2026 based on our assumptions of booking growth recovery in the second half and global air traffic growth of 3% in the year. I would like to end our presentation today with our value proposition. We are a large-scale mission-critical travel technology leader. We have deep, long-standing customer relationships at global scale. We have a robust financial framework and a resilient business model. We have a unique and diverse talent base empowered by a cohesive team culture. All of which gives us confidence in our solid growth prospects for the coming years and remain focused on driving value creation for our customers, employees and shareholders, delivering strong operating and financial performance into the midterm.
With this, we've finished the presentation and we can now open the call for any questions that you might have. Thank you.
Thank you ladies and gentlemen we will now begin the question-and-answer session. Should you have a question please press star followed by the one on your telephone keypad should you wish to decline or cancel your request please press star followed by the two if your using a speaker phone please lift the handset before pressing any keys. Your first question comes from Alex Irving from Bernstein. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon. Congratulations on the strong quarter. Two from me, please. For the first one, I'm going to start by quoting Sabre's CEO from their earnings call yesterday. Quote, "We believe Amadeus has a dominant monopoly position and they're making it very difficult for airlines to choose anybody but Amadeus for the new offer and order solutions. Working on approaches to that from a regulatory and legal standpoint." My question therefore is in two parts. First of all, what action do you think this refers to? Second, how would you defend that to a competition regulator? Second question, one normal one. Really good revenue per PB growth this quarter in Air IT. How sustainable is that as we go through the year? Phrased differently, how big is the one-off from the Middle East disruption in Q1? Thank you.
Look, let me start with the first question. I mean, we have always competed on the strength of our technology for many years. The openness of our platform, and the value we create for customers, across the ecosystem. Our solution are chosen because we deliver the best outcome for our customer with which we have very close and long-term relationships. We have been investing a lot in offer and order for a long time. We have big groups that have decided to work with us, and we will keep delivering and of course engaging to keep our customers happy. That's everything I can say.
Alex, on your revenue per PB growth, you would recall that I mentioned there were 3 drivers for the revenue per PB growth. One was linked to you know, PB linked, you know, our normal run-of-the-mill inflation upselling Nevio. Run-of-the-mill, that's I'm downplaying it, but all the great work that our commercial teams do. I mentioned our non-transactional component, which is the growth that we're seeing on professional services. Your question is really around the disruption-related services. This is transactional, but it's not PB linked. That represented about a third of our PB growth in the quarter. We expect that to moderate obviously, into the future, into the, into as the conflict kind of continues to resolve. We don't think that that is sustainable.
Understood. kind of underlying it would be about 6% and a bit.
Yeah
for the rest of it.
Yeah.
Cool. Thanks.
Your next question comes from the line of Sven Merkt from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good afternoon. Hi, Luis. Hi, Carol. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe first can you speak a bit how you derived the 3% air traffic growth for the full year? What is factored in there in terms of the Middle Eastern impact, but also fuel-related voluntary or forced capacity reductions? Can you give us a bit more color on the booking trends you've seen in March, excluding the cancellation spike and how that has trended into April? Finally, it would be great if you could unpack a bit the growth in hospitality for us. What has been the underlying performance? Has there been any impact from the Middle East on that segment in the quarter? Thank you.
Okay. They sound quite funny.
Let me take a little bit the last one. Hospitality in general, not been very much impacted. I mean, as you know, we are very strong in the U.S. with our hospitality business. It has been less impacted by this situation. Yes, there has been always a small impact, but not in general. That's why. A little bit, yes, but it's not the size or the same scope that we may have with our other two businesses. This is why we have not really stated any adjustment or any specific point. I mean, yes, there's always a small impact, especially as we produce, you know, hotel bookings.
There are some parts of the business that we do with the Middle East, but overall the impact has been minimum in this third leg.
Yeah. Okay. If we're going in reverse order, I'll take the second last, which was the bookings growth. Maybe I'll first start by saying that with what we said in Q4 or in the full year is that we expected that Q1 would outperform Q4. If not for the Middle East impact, that statement would've been true. Without the Middle East impact, we would have had a 4% booking growth. It is true that we saw some deterioration in March. What we're seeing in April is the underlying booking growth improving from what we were seeing in March. That's basically due to moderation in the cancellation rates, air spaces reopening, airlines commenting very positively on demand profiles and things like that.
We still think that there'll be some slower bookings growth in Q2. Albeit improving April from March. Finally, your question, Sven, was on the 3% global growth. Our view is, well, let's again take it one step back. The IATA forecast for global traffic year to date February 5%, 2% in March. That's kind of the what we're going as a baseline. We believe that a reasonable assumption is to assume 3% global air traffic growth for the full year. On that basis, the range that we provided for our revenue would be within guidance. Having said that, our guidance is not all about volume, right?
There are other things that contribute to our revenue growth, and other areas, and I think we've demonstrated that, definitely in the Q1, that we've had continued unitary performance. We've had growth in revenue streams not linked to bookings or PBs. We're expecting a recovery in the second half of the year. That's how we've come up with our assumption of the 3%.
Great. Thank you.
Your next question comes from Charles Brennan from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for taking my question. I've got two if I can, actually. Firstly, just on the booking side, I think Sabre reported 6% bookings growth in the quarter. We don't often see you undergrowing, Sabre as a competitor. Where do you think you've left some growth on the table? Secondly, just broadly on your full year guidance. You're still guiding to high single-digit growth, but I'm assuming that high single-digit growth implied a range, and you're probably now assuming you're at the lower part of that range.
Can you just quantify for us the sort of, quantum of revenue change that you're now expecting versus the beginning of the year? Thank you.
Let me start with the first part. I mean, look, of course, we focus on ourselves. I cannot tell you what's, you know, our competitors do in terms of their own projections and their own figures. I cannot really talk about that. I can talk about ourselves. We keep gaining momentum. We are not losing customers. Therefore, we are in line with what we told you at the end of last year, with the exception of Middle East. We keep executing on our strategy, extending our, you know, breadth of customers and our customers around the globe. We are very pleased with our commercial performance.
I might just add a little bit to that too. Sabre is generally more prominent in the U.S. market, even though our NORAM region did grow in the quarter. It also has a bit of a different customer mix. I don't think it's fully comparable in terms of like for like. In terms of the guidance range, when we issued the outlook in 2026, we were very clear with the revenue assumption, the volume assumption, beg your pardon, that we had pegged our revenue forecast to. We said it was 4.5% of global air traffic growth. We also gave a range of high single-digit, meaning that we could operate within that range.
We think obviously, with a reduction in volume, there should be a reduction in revenue, and we might be more towards the lower end of the range. However, having as I said before, it's not all about volume, right? There's also been some over-performance in some uni-unitary metrics. We still, from what we can see today on the assumptions we have today, we still see that we can deliver revenue within the high single-digit range.
Perfect. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Michael Briest from UBS. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Just in, obviously the conflict, maybe it's, you know, there's a ceasefire now, but it's still impacting fuel prices especially. And it's also lasted more than a month, which was the impact in Q1. I maybe misheard you, Carol Borg, but did you say that bookings were expected to be negative in Q2 still, or was that just around April? 'Cause I know that's in the release. Can you talk about your expectations for Q2? If the conflict is not resolved by the end of June, is it fair to say that makes the 3% underlying assumption for the year hard to achieve? A question on NDC volumes.
I know you added Air Cairo to the list of customers, but it hasn't really progressed a lot in the last couple of quarters. Can you maybe talk about the dynamics there? Your competitor talked about 4% of their GDS volumes being NDC-based yesterday. Is there any update on that you can provide us? Thank you.
Okay, let me start with the last one. We are ahead of this figure that you mentioned. Overall, they keep growing very well. Again, as we implement new carriers, as a % of the total bookings, it keeps increasing. We are pleased with evolution of NDC volumes. And again, growing well, with all the impacts of the mix in the month of March that has generated some, you know, the impacts also in the mix. Overall, the NDC bookings keep increasing. As I said, very pleased with the evolution of that. It's still not a very high % of the total volume, but ahead the figure that you mentioned.
Yeah, mid-teens. We're still tracking mid-teens on our NDC penetration.
Okay, Carol, just to clarify, this is for the carriers that have been implemented.
Yes.
Overall, as a % of the GDS bookings is below that number.
Very, very big. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of Q2 bookings, yes, we do believe that we will still continue to have negative growth in Q2 on bookings. As I said, April was better than March, but still in negative territory. Having said that is in our projections for the full year. Despite a negative booking growth in Q2, we still think that we will deliver within our guided range. It's within our guidance expectations and forecasts.
I mean, let me add some colors because you said, look, if this keeps after June, I mean, look, yes. I mean, if the situation keeps as it is, probably the traffic will be less. Saying that, again, without trying to have a crystal ball at all, I mean, it depends how things evolve because sometimes conflicts stay in a situation that people get used to that and traffic comes back. It depends which kind of conflict. Of course, if things come back to the March situation, probably not. It could be a kind of stability or unsettling. We don't know how things will evolve.
Very often there is a big impact at the beginning on top of the cancellations and things start to recover and people start traveling even if the situation is not fully resolved. We will need to see. Again, I don't have a crystal ball of what may happen, but the natural evolution based on other situations like this one is that things improve slowly, even if the situation is not completely resolved. Then of course once it is resolved, usually there is a rebound of that. We are seeing that progressively, that things are improving. You also have seen that despite the current situation, some airlines in the Middle East are increasing their capacity and coming back to operations.
Of course, we'll need to see how this whole situation evolves and also of course, needless to say, what is the price of the fuel in the coming months. All that will have an impact difficult to predict, but this is why our assumption has been modest and prudent for the second quarter, and then we are assuming there will be further recovery in the second half. This is our current assumption.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from Nooshin Nejati from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon and congrats for the strong results. Two on my side, please. Maybe on cost flexibility. As volume disruption continues in Q2, how much more cost flexibility do you have without slowing the investment? Could you help us understand how you are thinking about monetization for agentic AI in traveler engagement over time? Should we expect economics to show up more through standalone modules, higher attach rate, transaction-based fees, or better retention with the existing travel seller offerings. Thank you.
Let me start with the second one. I mean, in medium term, the answer is yes. In many areas, we are already implementing solutions. In some others, we are testing. In general, our approach to new technology has always been based on value that we deliver. Try to see what is the, you know, what is the value, okay. Can this bring incremental revenue, as we are stating with Nevio when we implement Nevio? Is it more about optimization of cost of the customer? Based on that, of course, we price. In some cases, it will be part of our overall solution, but hopefully we'll be able to really charge more or upsell based on the quality of what we deliver.
In some specific cases, of course, there could be some, things very independent related to agentic AI that we'll monetize independently. But very often this is part of our overall relationship with the customers and our overall solutions. And again, we are implementing in the roadmap of all our portfolio as we speak. So it will be part of the natural, you know, contract and debate negotiation with our customers.
On the cost base, I've been quite proud actually of the resilience of the company in applying cost discipline in the past. I think we showed that in full year 2025, where our profit EBIT outgrew our revenue delivery. It is true that with the Middle East situation that we have now, we've implemented some tactical cost containment measures to again continue to try to offset the impact. There's the other structural thing that's really good about Amadeus is that we have some flexibility in our resourcing, particularly in our R&D area, where we can flex up and down to continue to maintain our momentum on investing in the right places at the right time, and ensuring that we maintain our leadership position.
Quite good discipline cost performance that we're seeing, and we'll continue to deploy cost containment measures for as long as we are in this situation.
Makes sense. Thanks.
Your next question comes from the line of Laurent Daure from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Good afternoon. I also have 2 questions. The first is on the strengths in professional services. I was wondering if it was linked to ramp-up of Nevio and if it's something that is sustainable in the years to come to have more services in the mix. My second question, if you don't mind, returning a minute on the IDEMIA deal you announced last week. In the last If you could share with us the last 3 years' average sales growth of the asset you bought, because there's been a lot of numbers thrown in the market recently. It would be interesting to know how much you need to achieve to go to high single digits from the growth rate you had in the last 2, 3 years. Thank you.
The professional services-
Yeah. Let me take that, okay. The answer is yes. We see more demand on services from our customers. Part of that, yes, is due to the implementation of Nevio, but not just that. I mean, even with Altéa, in general, our customers are requesting ourselves more, more people, more competency centers, you know, to optimize our solutions, to integrate with our solutions. Especially as well, we are offering more flexibility. It's more modular what we are bringing to the table. This is a trend that has happened during many years and keeps continuing. I don't see any reason. On the contrary, we see demand from our customers to support, you know, their business objectives.
I will say yes, we have reported that should be sustainable in the coming years.
It goes beyond Nevio, doesn't it, Luis?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
It's a lot of other activities that we're doing. In terms of your question on IDEMIA, I didn't quite follow it, but maybe I'd prefer to answer why we believe in the revenue growth trajectory that we've committed, which was high single digits. There are a couple of factors. One, there was a headwind in prior years with a change in a relationship with a key customer. The customer was the TSA, who moved to a multi-provider strategy. That caused obviously some delay in momentum. The second thing was these kind of renewal cycles, particularly with this customer as well, are on a 5-year cycle.
We know five years ago, we were in COVID, so we had depressed renewal cycles because of the lower impact from COVID. The recovery thesis for this kind of area is more around stabilization and rebuilding rather than returning back to the historical peak performance. We also then had some demand and procurement slowdowns in 2025, and things like the cost reduction policies that the Trump administration issued with the Dodge program, there were some U.S. federal employment adjustments and tariffs. We all felt that they were temporary demand pressures and procurement challenges that we believe will be unlocked moving forward. The final thing I'd say is that this probably talks to the beauty of the combination of Amadeus and IDEMIA.
You know, in our opinion, the success of the passenger facilitation area really depends on the airport integration workflow embedding and the airport relationships. This is where Amadeus, through our existing airport ops, the acquisition of Vision-Box, has very strong relationships. We believe that we can unlock that coupled with the very solid technology capability in IDEMIA. We feel that we can unlock those customer segments and integrate that moving forward. We feel comfortable in our revenue growth projection regardless of the historical performance.
That's useful. Thank you, Gaura.
Your next question comes from Victor Cheng of Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe 2 from my side. I appreciate we've talked a few times on bookings already. Can we dig a bit deep into, you know, trends in March and April? It sounded like April improved due to cancellations, but what other regions and booking types are you seeing improving? It looks like at least when I look at Q1, APAC looks exceptionally strong, but Western Europe looks a bit less strong in the quarter. I thought both regions were benefited from rerouting. On that point, do you also see some, you know, pull-forward effects as people plan ahead to avoid fare increases? Or is the booking window a lot shorter now, due to, you know, some regional uncertainty?
Second question relates to just, you know, can you provide maybe some rough split on in Air IT, what's the non-PB related revenue versus PB related revenue so we can better understand the unit economics evolution? Thank you.
Okay. In terms of trends, on bookings, firstly, let me just put it out there that it wasn't just the Middle East that affected us in Q1, right? We had some pretty significant impacts to disruption with the Lufthansa strikes, for example. There were storm events. There was a whole heap of other things. We did see some negative growth in other regions, beyond the M-MEA region. Having said that, I just wanted to reiterate that prior to the conflict, our PBs and bookings were growing strongly, and they were growing in line with the exit rates of last year. March, we saw a reduction primarily in bookings.
We did see a reduction in PBs, but a bigger reduction in bookings, particularly with volumes going through origin or destination in the Middle East countries, particularly the 11 conflicted countries. Thanks to our global presence, we did see an uplift in other locations, right? We saw some rebookings going to other regions. Asia-Pacific is an example that took a bit of growth from or the benefit from rebookings. I think I've mentioned already that we see March Sorry, beg your pardon, April bookings improving from March, albeit still in negative growth. We're seeing PBs that are moderating from March because of the lag effect. Your last kind of point on that, Victor, was we are seeing the booking cycle shortening.
I think there's some changes in behavior happening now with travelers, and so we are seeing that shortening. We still have a very high level of inventory that's not yet traveled, and our cancellations are normalizing, but we are still seeing that needing to see that come through. That was the trends for March. The second question was on. PB.
Non-PB linked revenue, in there.
Yeah. I think I mentioned there are three catalysts for that. There's the great work that our commercial teams do on inflation upselling, Nevio, all of that sort of stuff. I said a third of it was related to disruption activity. There's also an element of non-transactional revenue, which I think Luis just mentioned, the success that we continue to have in Professional Services, our Airport Business, and things like that. They're all contributing to the very attractive 8.6% revenue per PB growth in the Q.
Okay.
There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand the call back to Luis Maroto for closing remarks.
Thank you very much again for joining the call. We'll talk again at the end of July with an update, of course, of what happens from now to that date related to the Middle East situation. Thank you very much.