I’ll probably do a second installment of photos soon as it really was a very good conference. I went so far the other day as to say it was the best conference I had been to (including both internal and external events) since joining Amadeus in 2005. Almost 150 airline delegates, and almost all of them specialists in e-commerce. Some great presentations over two days (Affinity Shopper seemed to be the hot topic most airlines were interested in hearing about – this product was hinted at last year, but this time a live site was shown)
In fact it is rare that I write such a positive pro-Amadeus post, as normally I prefer to avoid mentioning my employer too much, but lately I’ve seen announcements of new GDS functionality launched that also looks very interesting for direct channels. One I saw today was Happy Hours for Negotiated Fares, and the other day I saw Baggage supersize (new SSR: SRXBAG-30KG) which allows pre-paying for excess baggage by the kilo. If I keep up this line of writing, I might have to look for a job in the marketing department!
Back to the conference last week in Cannes. I haven’t labelled the individual photos, but see how many of the following people you can pick out (well, maybe not from the first photo shown!). If you look hard enough from the second photo on, you will see (in no particular order) Jeff and Warren from V Australia, Meny from El Al, Guido and Edwin from AF-KLM, Gwen and Daragh from CityJet, Karianne, Hans Petter and Odd from Wideroe (accepting award for best look to book ratio), Blas from Mexicana, Jerome from Corsair, and others I have not mentioned by name.
So much fun, but a lot of good business conducted at the same time. If I haven’t convinced you that this is the one conference where you really want to get onto the invite list for next year, then I’ll have to try harder later this week when I get my hands on a few more photos to publish.
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