on 13 November 2009
Travel technology beast Amadeus is developing its own consumer flight concierge app for the Apple iPhone after cracking down on an individual app developer who used the company’s data to build his own.
Amadeus is planning to launch its first flight planning app in the first quarter of 2010 and will include a number of the features included in what it appears to have to considered to be a naughty interloper of a system.
MyFlightsApp launched in August 2009 and included such tools as a portal to store booking details, aircraft information, confirmation numbers and the ability to compile lists of multiple trips.
Amadeus says its new app will have a number of other features such as providing details of other elements of a booking (hotel, car hire, rail, etc) and have offline capability.
MyFlightsApp fell foul of Amadeus last week when on his blog titled Fun While It Lasted, developer Chris Schofield posted the following:
Unfortunately as of this week, I have removed the My Flights App from sale as Amadeus have removed support for any new purchases of the App.
The App will continue to function as before for all existing customers, but there can be no further sales and no further updates, and is no longer on iTunes or the App Store.
For those who did not have the opportunity to purchase the My Flights App, Amadeus will be releasing a similar App of their own in the very near future.
Thank you to everyone for your support in this product.
Amadeus, unsurprisingly, has a different side to the story. A spokesman at HQ in Madrid says:
“Amadeus has never supported this person or iFlight [sic] via this iPhone app.”
The company also claims it asked the developer to “stop screen scraping our checkmytrip.com site” – the customer-facing portal it uses to host flight and booking data.
Schofield had clearly upset Amadeus:
“It seems as if this person was using our infrastructure apparently without prior approval and without telling us, furthermore doing this on a commercial basis. In addition, what was shown on iFlight [sic] was data that was not displayed correctly especially for car/hotel.
“So the quality of the application is not as good as it might seem, especially given the fact that it is commercialised.”
Some might say this episode says a lot about how difficult it is for seemingly innocent developers to create a new service when either they do not have the rights to use existing systems (the barrier to entry scenario again) or the willpower to take on a company the size of Amadeus.
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An interesting read… especially Amadeus’ take on it. Thank you for picking up on this.
Before development I contacted Amadeus, and they suggested I use the screen scraping method as they only provide APIs to Travel Agents.
Following developing the App, it is launched and very successful, and the new take from Amadeus is “we’d like you to stop. Co-incidentally we’d like to launch our own version”.
Additionally, their comment on “data that was not displayed correctly especially for car/hotel” is interesting because the application is purely for flights, so no information for hotels or cars is displayed at all.
I will be interested to see what Amadeus came up with, especially as they commented “it’s amazing when you look at the two applications side by side – they’re so similar”. A lucky co-incidence for them…
It’s a shame – I’ve had many comments from users since saying how much they value the App.
This is an interesting story. I purchased MyFlights and I’m very happy with it. It’s a real shame that Chris has been forced to stop selling/supporting it just because Amadeus is planning (do they have an eta) to develop their own. I’m sure that if the Amadeus app is very similar Chris would have a case for copyright infringement, wouldn’t it be better if they just licences his app as the official version?
What ever happened to free markets and fair competition?