Picture, for a moment, being able to buy a single ticket that gets you from your home to your destination. From your front door to the train station, from the train to the airport, from your destination airport back on the train or in a taxi and straight to your hotel at the other end – integrated and seamless. This is the ambition for the next phase of our industry, a fundamentally new way of thinking about – and booking – travel.
Travelers want this door-to-door experience, one that is more sustainable, safer and comes with less hassle – and multimodal travel is the solution. As an industry, we are working to link formerly unconnected dots along a journey, offering tangible benefits to the traveler. As we connect new combinations of transport options and routes and make them visible to the traveler, a more digitalized mobility framework can offer travelers a more synchronized and frictionless end-to-end experience.
This is the vision, but challenges remain.
Making it frictionless
Delivering on multimodality requires that we continue to connect an industry that still is, to a large degree, unconnected.A myriad of transport providers –with different systems, search and booking channels,ticketing types and methods and travel retail services - need connecting.
The travel industry today, however, remains siloed and fragmented. Many services are disconnected and isolated from each other, information on different travel options are not available, and the traveler often is not able to see multimodal travel options. To drive change in the industry, transportation systems need to be connected both physically and technologically. To do this, Amadeus is building a real-time system, collecting data from multiple sources - covering everything from services, routes, schedules and fares.
This is an ongoing project. Currently, technology allows travelers to book different services in the same PNR, for example, providing them with a complete view of their door-to-door trip.The Amadeus Travel Platform, for instance, allows travel agencies to book and serviceall relevant content on air, accommodation, rail, mobility, insurance and destination from any single source on a single platform. But being able to combine these services all in one single transaction will take time.
Improvement is also needed on the experience front – for multimodality to truly work, every traveler needs to be able to enjoy an easy and seamless experience across their journey, regardless of provider. For example, a traveler may be starting their journey by going to Heathrow Airport, then flying to Paris via KLM, but then getting on to SNCF train and then a taxi to arrive at their destination outside of Paris.
Making more Sustainable Travel Choices
Although there are clearly still challenges in creating a more frictionless, consistent travel experience, there is a key driver that the industry can unite behind to help make it a reality: sustainability.
Travelers now expect sustainable options and choices to be offered during the booking phase. Amadeus’ own data shows that greater accessibility to green modes of transport, the use of electric power technologies and making sustainable travel more cost competitive are the top ways travelers believe travel can become more sustainable in the long-term. Multimodal travel technology can make this seamless.
Destinations, too, have a role to play in making the future as sustainable as possible. Many have long been aware of how improvements to mobility create a direct, positive impact on the lives of citizens, but have struggled to overcome a reliance on personal vehicles. But, by the end of the decade, nearly two thirds of us will live in urban environments, leading to congestion and capacity shortages, meaning change will become increasingly necessary. Combined with the arrival of new concepts like the 'smart city', the pressure to developsolutions that enable more sustainable, and eco-friendly inter-city mobility is growing.
In line with this, we are working to build sustainability into our tools. With Cytric by Amadeus, our travel and expense management solution, we help corporations manage travel in ways that help them expand their business while at the same time minimizing their carbon footprint. One of these is multimodality, nudging users into the most carbon-efficient form of transport.
Rail, for example, is emerging as a more sustainable travel option for many domestic travelers compared to air, and our tools offer a wide array of global rail content. By measuring the total carbon footprint of a trip, empowering buyers to take the most sustainable option, and informing travelers of the impact of their decisions, we keep working to give corporations the tools they need to make a difference.
Progress through collaboration
For travelers, multimodality is not just another option for a unique and personalized experience. It also ensures that the entire processfrom planning, to booking, to paying for the actual trip and return home is straightforward and greener.
At Amadeus, we have been at the forefront of multimodality innovation for over a decade.For example, Amadeus led All Ways Travelling (AWT), an industry consortium selected by the European Commission that successfully developed a proof-of-concept, multimodal system.However, a more connected, sustainable travel future also requires the active participation of more players, particularly as significant challenges remain for theintegration of different transport modes and delivering a consistent, cross-provider experience.We therefore welcome the Multimodal Digital Mobility Services initiative launched by the European Commission, which encourages the collaboration between transport providers and intermediaries toward a policy framework that promotes non-discriminatory access to transport data that is essential for consumers to compare and book multimodal trips.
Nobody can do it on their own and it is an entire ecosystem challenge, which is why Amadeus is engaging so actively in joint efforts across our industry to deliver solutions at scale.
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