The 15 Giants of Travel Industry

 

It was quite a clumsy Friday afternoon, and I found myself flipping thru the pages of a leading Airline industry magazine. Out of the blue, something that struck me was the assorted list of the top 15 travel companies of 2013. While the usual suspects such as British Airways, Delta Air Lines, Singapore Airlines and United Continental found themselves holding on their respective slots, what surprised me was the company that topped the list as ‘Numero Uno ‘- the China Airlines !

Again, what further caught my attention was the huge market capitalization that these companies command.  Just do a simple math, and you would know that the sum total of the market capitalization of the top 15 companies amounts to a whopping $ 383 billion. This would be the GDP of couple of Africans countries put together!! Again on similar lines, the sales total comes to a hilarious $296 billion.

Being an Airport/Aviation IT buff, I was eager to know the share of the pie that these companies invest in software to run their business.  I also wanted to check the software systems in place. To satisfy my curiosity, I pursued some secondary research. The result was amazing!

I found that all pure Airline companies from the list –China Airlines, Eva Airways, British Airways, Delta Air Lines, Singapore Airlines, and Southwest Airlines – use both Amadeus and Sabre for running their business.  An exception to the above is United Continental, which is contemplating on discontinuing the contract with Amadeus.

On the software side, these airline companies invest anywhere between 0.65 – 1.25 % of their revenue on software investments. This huge market addressed only by few software vendors such as SABRE, Amadeus, Galileo and Worldspan. It’s interesting to note that there is a huge market for small and medium software vendors who can apply value added services.  The obvious question is how to break in and get a share of pie. And the answer is simple – fortune favors the brave!