Amadeus: Traveler, Not Platform, Should Hold the Controls

Amadeus's president of Travel, Decius Valmorbida, heads to the Skift Global Forum in September with a thesis that begs for debate: the travel industry competes too hard on closed ecosystems and cooperates too little on the plumbing that makes everything work.

His bet is that open, shared foundations grow the pie for everyone. And here's the twist that gets me: the traveler should hold the controls, not the platform serving the offer. Sounds nice, but who blinks first? Building open APIs is easy if everyone chips in, the problem is when one player has already dug a moat around its data.

In my view, Valmorbida is right that the pie grows when travelers decide freely, but this industry's history shows that closed ecosystems die slowly. Let's see if the forum moves from words to action and rivals actually build together. Because whoever keeps the traveler happy wins, no matter the platform.