AMADEUS AND MICROSOFT JOIN FORCES TO IMPROVE ONLINE BOOKING PROCESS FOR BUSINESS TRAVELLERS
Amadeus has integrated its online booking and expense tool, Cytric, with Microsoft 365 – the first step in the companies’ joint vision to provide an immersive and collaborative travel and expense experience for global business travellers.
In recent years, online collaboration and hybrid work environments have been critical to the continued success of businesses. Despite these changes, travel and expense for corporate travel hasn’t moved with the times. Travellers must use and switch between multiple platforms and apps to log-on, search, book, pay and expense leading many business travellers to look for apps or platforms that allow them to do it all in one transaction.
Amadeus, in partnership with Microsoft, is taking the first step in their joint vision to redefine corporate travel: Cytric Travel & Expense, the Amadeus online booking and expense management tool, is now embedded in Microsoft 365. With the new tool – called Cytric Easy – users can plan trips and share travel details with colleagues without ever leaving their day-to-day applications such as Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Teams. Booking business travel is about to become faster and easier than ever before:
- One app: Search, compare, or book a hotel, flight, or car rental – without ever leaving Microsoft Teams
- Easy to share: The only travel and expense tool embedded into Teams with the ability to share trip information. Share in Teams chats to book the same trip as your colleagues
- Time saving: Minimise the time spent discussing trips with colleagues
- Collaboration: Share trip components with colleagues and enjoy connecting and collaborating on trip
Coming soon, Outlook calendar invites will populate relevant data before starting the search process, such as preferred departure location, destination based on meeting location and dates. Flight search results will show recommended options based on flight convenience, price, and users’ preferences (for example, stop-over airports to avoid). The shortest, cheapest, and greenest options will be highlighted. Teams will send users prompts to visualise unassigned receipts, complete their expense reports, and file them on time.
All of this will be done using Microsoft’s ‘Single Sign-On’ service across the users’ workplace ecosystem to access all travel and expense needs.
Amadeus and Microsoft identify need to integrate travel tools into one
This all means less disruption to the user’s workflow, and less hassle logging in and toggling between apps, the traveller just needs to login to Microsoft and they’re ready to go.
“Working with Microsoft this past year, our focus has been to reinvent corporate travel,” said Rudy Daniello, executive Vice President Amadeus Cytric Solutions. “With Cytric now embedded into Microsoft 365, toggling between applications will become a thing of the past, leading to improved productivity, and easier compliance with travel and expense programs. Most importantly, this collaboration with Microsoft simplifies decades’ old processes that impact departments across finance, procurement, and travel. This is just the first step in our joint vision to transform the travel and expense experience.”
“The integration of Cytric into Microsoft 365 will make the traveller’s experience more fluid,” added Eric Bailey, global travel director for Microsoft. “The ability to book plane tickets or manage travel expenses without leaving everyday collaborative applications will help make the process smoother for users, making travel easier and eliminating some of the usual booking challenges.”
The ambition of the partnership between Amadeus and Microsoft is to re-imagine travel, including the way users meet, collaborate, or claim expenses. The two companies will continue working together to foster collaboration and empower employees with a new hybrid way of working.
In another development, Cytric announced that Air France-KLM and Singapore Airlines New Distribution Capability (NDC) content has been integrated into Cytric via the Amadeus Travel Platform. Amadeus’s Cytric also integrated “Pay As you Fly (PAF)” fares set by the Lufthansa Group which includes Lufthansa, Swiss, Brussels Airlines and Austrian Airlines.
