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GLO Interview: Traveler Experience with Amadeus Nevio, Amélie Humbert and Frédéric Wenglorz, Amadeus

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Nevio and the Shift to Traveller-Centric Architecture

Why breaking legacy constraints is now essential for airline experience, retailing and loyalty

Airlines are at a turning point. While traveller expectations have evolved rapidly—towards personalisation, convenience and seamless journeys—the underlying systems that support airline operations have remained largely unchanged. The discussion around Nevio highlights a fundamental reality check for the industry: the way passenger journeys are managed today was designed for an operationally driven airline model, not for a traveller-centric, ecosystem-based experience.

This is precisely the gap Nevio is intended to address. Rather than optimising existing structures, it challenges the foundations on which airline journeys, data and offers have historically been built.

The limits of record-centric thinking

For decades, airlines have managed the passenger journey through a record-centric approach. Passenger Name Records, tickets and associated documents such as EMDs were designed to standardise and unify a highly operational industry. These standards played a critical role in enabling scale, interoperability and efficiency at a time when the airline product was largely defined by the flight itself.

However, that architecture is inherently airline-centric. Today’s travel experience extends far beyond flights and ancillaries, involving a growing number of actors, services and touchpoints that sit outside traditional airline systems. As offers expand into richer content, bundled services and broader ecosystems, legacy standards increasingly act as constraints rather than enablers.

Persisting with these structures limits airlines’ ability to retail dynamically, personalise meaningfully and coordinate experiences across the entire journey. The industry is no longer simply managing transport—it is orchestrating complex, end-to-end travel experiences.

Fragmented data: the second structural barrier

Alongside legacy records sits another long-standing challenge: fragmented data. While data and analytics capabilities have advanced significantly, the way data has emerged across airlines—and most industries—has been siloed. Different systems hold different pieces of information, without a unified, real-time view of the traveller.

The result is partial understanding. Airlines may know a customer’s booking in one system, their loyalty status in another, their preferences in a third and their disruption history somewhere else entirely. Without the full picture, personalisation remains limited and problem resolution becomes reactive rather than proactive.

These structural constraints are not minor inefficiencies; they fundamentally block the industry’s ability to evolve.

Starting from scratch: breaking down silos by design

Nevio is positioned as a response to these blockers, not by adding yet another layer of integration, but by rethinking the architecture from the ground up. Instead of systems stitched together over time, the objective is to build a seamless foundation where real-time data can be shared across all touchpoints and channels.

This approach enables a shift from airline-centric processes to traveller-centric capabilities. Artificial intelligence plays a key role here—not as a buzzword, but as a practical enabler of real-time decision-making. Demand prediction, model choice and contextual recommendations are early examples of how intelligence can be embedded directly into the journey.

At its core, Nevio is designed to place the traveller at the centre and build processes, offers and decisions around that centre.

From partial views to a 360° understanding of the traveller

A traveller-centric system depends on a complete and coherent view of the individual. By bringing together data across systems, airlines can understand who the traveller is at that specific moment and respond accordingly. This enables personalised and contextual offers to be delivered consistently—across channels, before, during and after the trip.

Equally important is the orchestration of the journey in real time. Disruption remains one of the most critical moments in travel, yet it is often handled through fragmented processes. With a unified view of the traveller and real-time data exchange, issues can be resolved faster and with far less friction, placing the traveller—not the operational constraint—at the heart of the response.

What traveller-centric retailing looks like in practice

The value of this shift becomes clear when applied to a real-world scenario. Consider a traveller who makes an annual family trip during peak season. Historically, systems would treat each booking as a standalone transaction, prompting standard add-ons such as extra baggage or seats without fully understanding context.

A traveller-centric approach changes this entirely. Past behaviour, loyalty status and trip patterns are recognised automatically. If baggage is already included through status, redundant offers are avoided. Instead, the system can propose alternatives that genuinely add value—such as tailored bundles, optimised travel dates, lounge access adapted to a family situation, or ground transport that fits the traveller’s needs.

Payment can also become more intuitive. Knowing that the traveller has sufficient loyalty currency to offset part of the trip enables a seamless split between miles and card payment, reducing friction and improving conversion.

What matters here is not the individual feature, but the orchestration: relevance replacing repetition, convenience replacing complexity.

A foundation for the future of experience and loyalty

Not every element of this vision will appear at once. Many of these capabilities are already emerging incrementally across the industry. What Nevio aims to enable is the architectural foundation that allows them to work together coherently, at scale and in real time.

From a broader industry perspective, this represents a shift from managing journeys as a series of disconnected transactions to treating them as a continuous, traveller-aware experience. It has direct implications not only for retailing, but also for loyalty, service recovery and long-term customer value.

For airlines, the message is clear. Future differentiation will not come from adding more systems or more offers, but from removing the structural constraints that prevent personalisation, relevance and seamlessness today. Nevio is positioned as one step towards that future—where the traveller, not the record, becomes the organising principle of airline experience design.

Source: GLO