At the moment we are hearing daily that travel is going to be the first to be cut back in the economic turmoil. We hear resorts and even countries (Senegal is one) reporting bookings down by 30% or more. January and February are usually the months for leisure bookings to occur so these figures should be a worry to all in the industry. But it poses an interesting question that I have been asking friends and colleagues. Will you holiday less this year?

Strangely the answer never seems to be a definitive no. People mention money, time and that they have yet to plan their vacations. So is there still hope for resorts and agents that holiday bookings will occur but just later on this year. We will not know for a few months how the capacity in summer has faired but perhaps you can let us know your thoughts and give us the reason that will most effect your decision.

Regards,

The Amadeus.net Team.

Dear All,

2009 starts with news of credit crunch’s and recession around the world. What affect this will have on the travel industry we are still unsure.

On Amadeus.net we have seen very little change so far. Traffic remains strong, users are certainly clicking onto our partners to search for flights, hotel and cars information and fares. Amadeus as a whole is responding to ensure that we add extra value for our customers and help them deliver to their clients.

What does 2009 mean to you as a traveller or a travel professional?

We wish you all the best for this year and will endeavor to help you and provide you with the best source of information for travel data on the web.

The Amadeus.net team

Dear All,

Just to let you know that the Amadeus.net site has now been moved to new servers. This has increased our performance for the site and I hope that you are all noticing the difference in page load speeds. Thanks to the production team who did this (its a lot of work) so diligently and quickly.

If you are still having problems with the site loading it could be because it is quite heavy on Java script and you are using an old browser. We would suggest upgrading to Firefox version 3 or Internet Explorer version 8 if you are able to as these have been built to manage Java script and there will be many many more sites following this pattern in the future so your entire ‘net’ experience will improve.

The Amadeus.net team

Dear Users,

Today you will notice that some bugs on the new version of Amadeus.net have been fixed. We hope that this helps your experience with the site and allows you to find what you are looking for.

Flight Timetables

The first fix is in the Flight Timetable section http://www.amadeus.net/plnext/meb/TimeTableSearch.action?SITE=BCEUBCEU&LANGUAGE=GB. We were originally showing the flight details in a ‘Lght Box’. With certain resolutions this sometimes meant that the ‘close box’ link was hidden below the footer of your browser. We have replaced the ‘Light Box’ with a expand and collapse feature which also shows the details for the flights better. With in this section too we have reviewed the flight data that was being returned by the flight details. This has now been corrected and you can rely 100% on the information available.

Fligh Availability

The second section the be updated is the Flight Availability pages http://www.amadeus.net/plnext/meb/AirSearch.action?SITE=BCEUBCEU&LANGUAGE=GB. in this section there was a problem with the inbound flights list. It was taking the entire outbound and inbound details and putting them on one page. This is now solved and once again the information available is 100% correct and you can easily find and save this data. Don’t forget to use the clipboard function to compare your preferred flights.

We are continually updating the site with improvements and fixes. Please continue to get in touch with us by leaving posts on the Amadeus.net Blog.

The Amadeus.net team.

Dear Users,

Thank you for your comments on this blog. They are very helpful.

A number of emails have been coming in which back up the comments below. They indicate that response times can be slow or pages are hanging on the flight search. This issue is occurring in a very few number of cases but occurs regularly with those users that are unfortunate enough to have the problem.

We are working very closely with our partner to solve the issue and hope to do so asap. in the meantime if you are experiencing this issue please use IE and you should be able to search and find the flights and bestfares you need.

The Amadeus.net team.

Dear Users,

You will have now noticed that Amadeus.net has changed. We have the same great content but it is accessed and displayed differently. We hope that you like it – we certainly do.

The header is the main navigation of the site and it is possible to access the homepages of each individual item separately. We have all the same sections as we did before so there are no products that you used to use that you cannot find here. In addition we have added a Fares section to the site. This allows users to search routes and prices and then to click onto an airline or agency website to book.This new product is a huge success with our users and we hope to expand on this by adding it to other languages that we have available on the site.

We recognize that this is a consumer focused part of the site and we hope to add additional content to help these users in the future. But we also recognize we have a large user base that are businesses researching travel for their employees or their own clients. All the tools that you use are still here, availability, flight stats and timetable being just some of these.

These tools are mainly accessed through the header. Once on the page you wish you can search for your outbound and inbound destinations with a new ‘auto complete’ function to help you easily find your airports by city name of code. Once the results are returned the pages have multiple new functions to help you find the exact flight that suits you best. These ‘filters’ allow you to choose the best criteria for you – you can choose by airline name, flight time, type of aircraft and a range of airports to name just a few.

This is the beginning of further enhancements to Amadeus.net which will help you all research travel better. We will be bringing in an improved Flight Status function, Trip tools and also increase the number of languages introducing Russian and Chinese amongst others.

Please let us know your views of the site and where we can make improvements.

The Amadeus.net team.

Dear Amadeus.net users,

We are delighted to share with you a sample of how the new Amadeus.net website will look. Taking into account the different feedback you have made in the past we have started with the homepage and flight availability pages. We have concentrated on delivering a clean design but still allowing for the display of the large amount of information which is present on our result pages. You will alnotice that we have added a new bestfares section which allows users to find prices and book on preferred partners.

The first noticeable changes are in the graphical layout and colours. The larger header gives better visibility to the site structure and the colours differentiate between the content. Blue for the Flight pages, Green for Hotels and Orange for Cars. As a user you will also notice a clearer layout making use of the space available on the page and allowing for extra tools such as the destination cloud, quick links to this blog and also to social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and more. Functionally the site has improved too. A quick search has been implemented on the homepage where a user can do a direct search for flight availability (car and hotel to be introduced soon). The landing pages of each section are still available if more search options are needed to narrow the search down.

On the flight availability page you can check where you go with the interactive world map! You can easily replay one of your previous searches thanks to the new recent search recorder. There is more too; on the flight results pages we have introduced a sophisticated filter system which allows you to manipulate the results and return the best flight for yourself. Don’t miss the possibility to also select and compare flights via the clipboard.

Probably the largest difference to our content has been the introduction of fares and partners where users can book the best deals they find. You can access this from all parts of the site so once you have found the information on a flight, hotel or car rental you are now in a position to go ahead and book it too.

These changes are just the beginning; throughout 2008 we will be enhancing the site with all our current content and also adding additional information; designed to make the site the best source of information on flights, cars and hotels on the web.

We sincerely hope you will enjoy using the site!

Please do not hesitate to send us your feedback by adding your comments to this post.