4 Years and 1 Pandemic Amadeus Journey Into Corporate Venturing

While business suffered, so did innovation within organizations, including at Amadeus, a Spanish multinational that provides software solutions to the global travel and tourism industry.

At Amadeus, business innovation and acceleration happens at its incubator Nexwave. The business incubator, in place two years prior to the pandemic, was forced to pivot in response to the pandemic challenges. But the venture teams succeed in turning the crisis into opportunities, innovating services and platforms in a post-COVID world in which tourism has rebounded with new service expectations.

When Mesnage took over the team in 2017, she conducted discussions with stakeholders to understand their perception of the innovation group. The stakeholders felt that while the team was working on various initiatives such as startups, sandboxing, and innovation programs, they did not see significant impact coming from these efforts. Thus, a mission to drive impact with innovation at Amadeus was formed.

To achieve the desired impact, they collaborated with the rest of the company to define an innovation strategy. The strategy aimed to establish the fundamentals of innovation and create alignment throughout the organization. The strategy was based on three pillars: why they do things, what they do or where they innovate, and how they do it. The focus was on being traveler-centric, aiming to improve the end-to-end travel experience. They adopted a lean startup approach, starting multiple projects and expecting some to fail. They began implementing this strategy in 2019 with five projects, then expanded to 10 in early 2020. However, the industry was greatly affected when the COVID-19 pandemic struck and shut down the world.

The pandemic had a significant impact on the travel industry, with the volume of passengers dropping to zero. Amadeus and its customers faced economic challenges due to the decline in travel. As an innovation group, they had to reevaluate their focus and identify what would matter in a post-COVID world. They narrowed it down to three priorities: go informed, providing necessary information for travelers in a pandemic world; go safe, ensuring safety measures and frictionless processes; and go local, facilitating local travel experiences.

They decided to focus on three projects from their ongoing portfolio and adopted a more proactive approach to make things happen.

Project 1: Simplifying the end-to-end travel experience

The first opportunity is an end-to-end servicing solution for B2B customers. It allows them to accompany travelers throughout their journey by offering contextualized services. Depending on the traveler's location in their journey, they may receive proposals for transfers, lounge access, activities at the destination, or restaurant recommendations. This solution breaks the silos between different travel actors and enables a comprehensive end-to-end travel experience.

Project 2: Streamlining passenger verification

The second opportunity is called traveler ID, which is a platform that facilitates the digitalization of identity and document verification in travel. It aims to simplify the process of showing identity documents, visas, and even vaccine records when traveling. By connecting digital identity forms to various touchpoints in travel, such as boarding, baggage drop, hotel check-in, and car rental, traveler ID streamlines the verification process. The implementation of digital identities is seen as crucial for personalization and authentication in travel and beyond.

Project 3: Creating local experiences at destinations

Amadeus has developed a B2B local experience platform. This platform focuses on creating local experiences at destinations, which is important for inspiring travel and creating memories. It also helps to foster loyalty and engagement with customers in an industry where travel frequency is low. The platform aims to fill the gap between trips by offering content and continuing the conversation with travelers.

Amadeus classifies its businesses into ABCD categories, with incubation being the initial stage of validating and removing uncertainties (Group D). This stage involves validating key business fundamentals and then validating the scaling recipe and growth trajectory, ready to go to the Scaling Up stage (Group C). With the three businesses mentioned, Amadeus is currently in the incubation stage, working to bridge any remaining gaps and validate the key business fundamentals. They believe they can achieve this milestone within the year, after facing challenges and making necessary pivots during the crisis.

Finding Opportunities in Challenges

To overcome the challenges faced during the crisis, Amadeus had to make various pivots and adapt their strategies. These difficulties also presented opportunities for their projects. For example, the traveler ID project initially focused on identity verification but found success when airlines needed to verify COVID documents. They signed up over 20 customers and even though the COVID requirements have subsided, the customers continue to rely on the solution, leading Amadeus to pilot back into identity verification.

Similarly, the local experience platform found an opportunity when the French government wanted to boost tourism after the crisis. Amadeus partnered with the French government to power a platform called "En Autotour," gaining momentum and signing contracts with hotels. However, the solution still relies on manual intervention from hotel staff or guests to scan the solution. As a result, they began exploring partnerships with influencers, which proved successful. This year, Amadeus aims to automate the process with hotels, scale their influencer collaborations, and connect all their travel agent customers.

Factors that Drove Success

The ventures succeeded for a number of reasons. The teams worked with a sense of urgency and collaboration that arose naturally during the crisis. A focused strategy and the willingness to make tough decisions, such as stopping projects and making necessary changes helped meet goals.

Working with internal and external partners also played a significant role in their success, as seen in their collaboration with airlines for the travel ID project and their partnership with the French government.

Despite these successes, they still face struggles, particularly with respect to processes at the larger Amadeus corporation that the venture teams must comply with. And somewhat ironically, accessing Amadeus customers and technology became more difficult after things returned to normal. They are implementing measures such as incentives for the sales team to facilitate access.

Each venture is led by an intrapreneur who has a combination of experience in the corporate world and as an entrepreneur. When the crisis hit, they had 50-15 projects and had to select and reduce the number. The intrapreneurs who stood out were those who had a good understanding of both corporate and entrepreneurial cultures, as they were better equipped to navigate the challenges and opportunities that arose with the projects.