SriLankan Airlines goes for ‘Altea suite’

SriLankan Airlines, the national carrier of Sri Lanka and the Amadeus IT Group, a leading technology partner for the global travel industry inked an agreement to upgrade the operational processors to Amadeus’ full Altea suite by 2014.

The deal will enable both SriLankan Airlines and its sister airline, Mihin Lanka, to adopt Amadeus next generation IT suite to manage its mission critical reservations, ticketing, inventory and departure control processors. It will also facilitate the airline's entry into the oneworld global alliance.

“SriLankan Airlines is one of the first to adopt the Altea Suite in the Indian subcontinent and this will support the efforts to improve efficiency as the technological development is critical for today's aviation industry.

The implementation is crucial to the evolution and expansion of SriLankan Airlines to derive the benefits from our inclusion within the oneworld global alliance, Director and Chief Executive Officer, SriLankan Airlines, Kapila Chandrasena said.

The Altea suite will truly modernise our IT processors, enhancing our service provision, whilst enabling us to become a more ‘customer centric’ carrier than ever before which is highly significant for our employees, passengers and partners, he said at the signing ceremony on Thursday in Colombo.

“Having the right technology is important and we have obtained the approval from the government for US $ 5 million capital infusion over the next five years to modernise the existing fleet,” he said.

The airline has seen a reasonable growth where measures were taken to increase the capacity to leverage with the growth in the travel industry and economy, Chandrasena said.

Under the terms of the ten year agreement, the two companies will work in close co-operation to begin the migration process from SriLankan’s existing passenger service system to Altea with the first phase of the migration covering the reservations, inventory and ticketing modules scheduled to be completed during the year. Migration to the Altea departure control system module is planned to commence in the first half of 2014. Currently this system is used by over 120 airlines globally.

- SJ