The Affinity Shopper project by Amadeus IT Group won the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit top prize after beating off competition in the final round from Translations.com, Gliider and EveryTrail.
A reasonably worthy winner, some are saying, and an unusual one given that many believe innovation comes primarily from smaller companies who have to throw their efforts into creating something new in order to challenge the status quo.
Affinity Shopper is a classic skunkworks project from within one of the largest travel technology firms on the planet, so kudos to Amadeus for attempting to create something it, and some others, say is a game-changer.
The next stage for Amadeus will be to see how quickly such a fundamentally different way of searching for air fares is embraced – or not – by visitors to airline websites.
Abandoning From-To-Date type search in favour of less tangible details such as Price Range, Interests and Regions is an obvious approach to take.
And with Lufthansa on-board as its first customer and two other unnamed airlines apparently going live by the end of the year, Amadeus will find out pretty quickly if this change is welcome.
It could, of course, ask Air New Zealand.
The flag carrier from the southern hemisphere has created its own similar service – a product which has a number of similar tools to Affinity Shopper.
There is also QFly from the Netherlands.
Some while other sites may consider themselves to be the pioneers, Affinity Shopper has developed something which has the best bits from both services and, most importantly, added the activity-based elements into the pot.
It is what we might call, a meaningful mashup.
Great post and thanks for profiling our ‘How far can i go’ product.
This has been live for a quite a while now and is seen as a valuable customer tool, especially for our Airpoints members (1 Airpoint dollar = $1 and can be spent on any Air NZ flight). Our Airpoints members can visually see where their points can take them without doing regular flight searches.
Affinity shopper certainly takes this to the next level and provides the user with a lot more information. But i feel it has missed the mark in regards to inspiring people to travel. The technology is certainly impressive and I look forward to someone utilising it in a more aspirational and customer focused way. A product with a lot of potential!
Cheers,
Lewis Billinghurst
airnewzealand.co.nz
QFly appears to have taken a liberal approach by including “dating” in the activity-based flight search. Those crazy Dutch…
Apart from the similar projects started by different companies I believe the power of Amadeus Affinity Shopper stays also in the huge cached data behind which can produce more relevant and “fresh” air fares.
Having lived on both sides of the fence (1A + startups), the most impressive thing about Affinity Shopper is that it is already live and “in production”.
- With one of the worlds’ largest carriers (i.e. largest datasets).
- Fully integrated with the real booking steps.
- Multilingual.
- Supporting both G and MS maps.
Basically it’s a full product, not a concept nor an idea or a prototype.
So hats off to Denis & team.
The only thing left to improve in my opinion is a nicer UI to make it visually appealing and easy to use.