SWISS changing their booking system to Amadeus in 2016
 

Hello,

I've always been rather curious why SWISS doesn't use Amadeus as their booking system, which is rather strange given that the rest of the LH Group and the majority of Star Alliance uses it.

Will SWISS be changing to Amadeus anytime soon. And if not, why?

Recently the rumour is they made some rather large investments with SITA so I doubt they will be changing shortly FWIW.

LX has contracts with atraxis/EDS/HP that run for some time (LX use axsRes and axsControl). AFAIK they will move to Amadeus Altea after LH does. LH has already moved the RM to Altea Inventory system, DCS and ticketing will follow in mid 2014. Sita is infrastructure.

AY migrated to Altea with a LOT of problems, I've been part of a checkin meltdown in December and it has repeated a few times since then.

SK migrated to Altea in Feb last year and has been mostly OK so far. LH has migrated their entire nordic operation to Altea as a test last year (because SK does the handling of LH there) and is learning from it. So far all is positive.

LX to use Amadeus
 

Finally LX will use Amadeus in its reservation system as early as 2016:

http://www.travolution.co.uk/article...ines-deal.html

early!!! :D

At long last.

Long.

It should be a requirement for Star Alliance airlines.

Indeed, the Amadeus Altéa platform was developed with *A to provide a common basis. UA opted out when CO took them over, but all other partners primarily use it. SN&LX are due to follow LH & OS who will migrate later this year. TP already migrated from axsRes to Altea, so they will have some experience already.

In GVA all *A carriers still use axsRes, with the exception of A3. It's now been 3 years that I hear we're moving on to Altéa, still no news, some airlines did the move but none of them but A3 were part of *A.

Anyway that is good for me as I prefer my old program and not a fan at all of GUI interfaces. But well, I guess it'll be good for everybody in the end.

No matter how messed up it will be, it cannot possibly be worse than the status quo.

At ZRH LH left LX de facto non-operational. The times I heard "we can no longer.." for the most trivial of all operations is mind blowing. Cannot upgrade an LH flight operated by LH as the system doesn't allow access to LH 'stuff'.
Cannot change the seat on an LH operated flight (after the seat was change automatically for me :rolleyes: ).

Cannot upgrade an LX flight with M&M instruments as it has been booked by a 3rd party (my most recent encounter) - the degree of how non-op LH/LX are at ZRH is hard to convey.

It takes a long time to migrate from one IT platform to another. So for a migration that starts mid-2014 to end in 2016 is quite reasonable. The real question is: why didn't they start before mid-2014, for instance in 2006?

imho Swiss had just renewed their contract before LH took over, and quitting it and changing to LH's platform would have cost some money..

And we all know how the bean counters in Frankfurt work.. don't spend a penny to save a pound ;)

PLus you have to consider that its not just using a new software, they have to replicate their fine tuned revenue management over to Altea, which requires considerable effort.