The company claims it is unique among rivals in having spent a total of €4 billion on research and development, and Sara Pavan, investment manager at Amadeus Ventures, said the company was “trying to capture the right technology before it’s too late” to help its agent customers.

To date, Amadeus has “filtered” 1,200 start-ups and invested in eight companies, including EVA (a virtual assistant) and FlyR (fare protector). Pavan added that areas such as virtual reality (VR) and blockchain were on the company’s radar.

“Blockchain is the next big disruptor,” she said, describing how it could lead to the simplification of loyalty programmes, streamline B2B payments and improve one-click check-outs. “If we’re not ready for when blockchain arrives, we’ll be dead. We’re in exploration mode here,” she warned.

"If we’re not ready for when blockchain arrives, we’ll be dead"

Meanwhile Sam Abdou (pictured above), head of the leisure unit for western Europe, Amadeus IT Group Middle East and Africa, said agents must ensure their websites return results quickly. “Amazon has said for every delay of a second in returning results, it loses $1.6 billion. And Google said if it slowed its results by 0.4 seconds, it would lose eight million searches a day, which equals £70 million in revenue.”

He said that Amadeus’s Master Pricer was essential to help travel agents compete, and could be personalised as it “caches and recomputes data based on your travel customers”.

He added that 12 OTAs using the tool saw a 20% increase in conversion rates.