Speaking at Amadeus’s inaugural Search Matters event in London last week, Rudy Daniello, vice-president of product management at Amadeus IT Group, said: “We have been doing a pretty lousy job at delivering airline sales, with [just] seat and price.

“That has led to airlines reacting with [Iata standard] NDC. We need to help the airlines, and you.”

NDC (New Distribution Capability) is an airline distribution format promoted by Iata for the development and market adoption of an XML-based data transmission standard. Merchandising has been a key theme for both airlines and GDSs over the past few years, and Daniellio said that coupled with increasing demand from consumers, Amadeus aimed to place more “pictures and videos” into search results to help agents upsell and cross-sell.

“Customers expect you to deliver merchandising. When customers search and compare, how do you project in search the fare families and ancillaries, so you can upsell and cross-sell, so you can monetise? We need to bring it to you in a homogenised way.

“You’re telling us that you don’t want to know the special code for one bag, for example. We do that behind the scenes. “Merchandising is mostly bags, seats and fare families. We now need to bring you pictures and videos.”

As a result, he added the company would look at screen-scraping other websites, citing some low-cost carriers’ reluctance to offer Amadeus their full fare inventory. “It could be that we do something we’ve never done before: screen-scrape,” he revealed.

“Not a lot, but at least you’ll have a homogenous point of view. “We integrate, not aggregate. If you rely on [a carrier’s] API, you’re stuck. I’m not breaking the [airline’s] terms and agreements – but I will have integrated the data.”