In today's market it is vital that airlines harness all available revenues and remove unproductive bookings.

Against this backdrop, Amadeus has extended its revenue integrity portfolio with the launch of the Automated Ticketing Limits solution, which provides innovative flight firming features as it delivers real time assignment of ticketing time limits and instant prompts directly onto travel agents' desktops.

Amadeus Revenue Integrity , the flagship solution in the portfolio, is the market leader in its field, processing over 1.6 million bookings per day and covering nearly 60% of all US domestic passenger traffic. Amadeus is registering a continued strong uptake of the product, with the latest signatures of 10 major airlines around the globe during 2008.

Amadeus Revenue Integrity helps airlines optimise revenues by ensuring their commercial flight firming and duplicate-check policies are applied on every booking. This is achieved by checking reservations against predefined business rules, in order to detect and process reservations that are not likely to materialise or do not comply with an airline's policies. Eliminating these non-productive bookings allows airlines to resell seats, ensuring maximum revenue collection.

Automated Ticketing Limits was developed in conjunction with Amadeus' airline customers and can be sold as a stand alone solution or in conjunction with Amadeus Revenue Integrity. Air France is the first airline to launch Amadeus Automated Ticketing Limits.

Catherine Colbus Medioni, Vice President, Revenue Management, Air France commented: "With this solution we can ensure that travel agents are prompted about ticketing time limits immediately, whilst they are still dealing with customers, which increases operational efficiency and improves customer service. In addition, we are able to reduce revenue leakage by eliminating the cost of non-productive bookings and improve revenues through the reselling of released inventory."

Automated Ticketing Limits is the latest development under the umbrella of the Amadeus Airline Retailing Platform*, a new distribution proposition launched earlier this year. Furthermore, Air France is the first airline to use the intuitive graphical management interface of the Airline Retailing Platform to manage in real-time and self administer their business rule set-up through all the Amadeus points of sales, in compliance with their business policies.

Frederic Spagnou, Vice President, Airline Business Group, Amadeus, said: "In today's challenging economic climate airlines are telling us they need support to both safeguard revenues and remove any barriers to revenue optimisation. This is why we continue to invest in our revenue integrity portfolio and why so many airlines rely on us. This latest solution demonstrates our commitment to help airlines optimise revenues and improve profitability.