AMADEUS IT GROUP SA

Their core work

Amadeus IT Group is a major global travel technology company headquartered in Madrid, providing IT solutions that power booking, ticketing, and operations for airlines, railways, and travel agencies worldwide. In H2020, they contributed their deep expertise in travel distribution systems and real-time passenger data processing to EU research on seamless multimodal transport. Their role centers on integrating disparate travel data sources — rail, air, urban transit — into unified platforms that enable door-to-door journey planning and traveler re-accommodation across transport modes. They also brought their large-scale infrastructure experience to a cybersecurity project focused on improving security information and event management (SIEM) systems.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Amadeus's early H2020 work (2015-2017) focused on foundational interoperability challenges — building semantic web frameworks, big data architectures, and one-stop travel shopping platforms through IT2RAIL and EuTravel. Their later projects (2016-2019+) shifted toward more applied, service-oriented topics: co-modality, real-time passenger re-accommodation (Co-Active), and full Mobility-as-a-Service ecosystems (MaaSive). The trajectory shows a clear move from data integration infrastructure toward complete end-user travel service platforms.

Amadeus is moving from backend travel data integration toward front-facing MaaS platforms, making them a strong partner for projects combining multimodal transport with real-time passenger services.

How they like to work

Amadeus consistently participates as a partner rather than leading consortia, which is typical for large industry players contributing specific technology capabilities to research-driven projects. With 65 unique partners across 14 countries in just 5 projects, they operate in large, diverse consortia — their average consortium size is roughly 13 partners. This broad but non-leading engagement style means they bring substantial industry infrastructure and real-world validation capacity without competing for project direction.

With 65 unique consortium partners spanning 14 countries across just 5 projects, Amadeus has built a wide European network concentrated in the transport research community. Their reach is broad rather than deep — many different partners rather than repeated collaborations with the same groups.

What sets them apart

Amadeus is one of the world's largest travel technology companies, meaning they bring genuine production-scale infrastructure and market access that most research partners cannot. Where universities and SMEs contribute research concepts, Amadeus can validate and deploy solutions against real airline and railway booking systems used by millions. For consortium builders in transport or MaaS projects, Amadeus offers the rare combination of global IT infrastructure, deep domain data, and a direct path to market adoption.

Highlights from their portfolio

• MaaSive
  Largest project by far (EUR 2.17M to Amadeus alone), focused on enabling Mobility as a Service in the IP4 transport ecosystem — signals strong commitment to MaaS.
• IT2RAIL
  EUR 1.27M contribution to the Shift2Rail initiative, combining semantic web, big data, and interoperability for multimodal travel — their most technically broad project.
• DiSIEM
  Only non-transport project, showing Amadeus's cybersecurity capabilities for large-scale IT systems — an unexpected cross-sector competence.