Amadeus is taking its technological capabilities and expertise beyond travel to tackle the challenges posed to societies by rapid urbanisation and the growth of mega cities, and Asia will be the test bed.

Its Smart Cities initiative, launched last week, is aimed at building a stronger understanding of the problem and how it can develop true ‘smart mobility’ to counter the negative effects of urbanisation.

The ambition is to then tie that back to its core travel businesses to create a massive data platform that will enable seamless travel on all fronts. It comes at an ideal time as Amadeus IT Group performs well financially, as indicated by its Q1 2018 financial report. The report highlighted 3.1% revenue growth between January to March compared to 2017, reaching €1.23B. In distribution, travel agency air bookings reached 160M, representing 3.7% growth. In IT Solutions, there was a 22.7% increase in passengers boarded too, raising the total to 416.9M.

But first, the urbanisation problem. According to current predictions, 70% of us are expected to live in cities by 2050, and 75% of the world’s resources and energy will be consumed by urbanites.

“We see it particularly in Asia, it is the epicentre of these problems,” said Simon Akeroyd (Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Business Development, Amadeus). There are 22 megacities in APAC, 11 in China alone, making the region the perfect ‘test bed’ for this programme.

“The mandate for me is to go and test [startups]… and pick the ones that have a chance of success. Asia is a very important region for us from that perspective. There is so much diversity that we can check ideas in lots of different Asian cities and get a much better guess on which will globalise across to America and Europe,” said Akeroyd.

Read the full article here.