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Making your dream trip takes brilliant ideas, close collaboration, and reliable technology

Direct News Source

Gilles Karlé, Chief Strategy Officer, Kiwi.com

At Kiwi.com, our goal is simple: to help people book travel easily at the best price. Why make things more complicated than they need to be?

While we are primarily an online travel agency known for pioneering virtual interlining, we're also a travel tech company. The company was founded seven years ago by three guys working from a bedroom. Fast forward to now, and we have more than 2,600 people across 15 different locations in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Ensuring smooth trips is why Kiwi.com worked with virtual interlining to begin with. Put simply, virtual interlining is the process of connecting two flights on non-cooperating airlines that might not otherwise be connected. At Kiwi, we built our own algorithms to create these connections, first from low cost carrier to low cost carrier and then, with the help of Amadeus, from low cost carrier to full service carrier (and now we're also combining airlines with trains and buses!).

Because we connect routes on airlines that don't necessarily partner with each other, customers might worry that if their first flight is delayed, this would affect their next leg. For this reason, we offer the Kiwi.com guarantee which protects the traveler from flight delays, cancellations and schedule changes. In these cases we offer the traveler an alternative flight or refund the cost of the unused tickets. On top of this, we also support the traveler with transportation to another airport, overnight accommodation and food and drink. We want to ensure as smooth a trip as possible for the traveler.

Amadeus' technology and data were absolutely instrumental in delivering our promise to travelers through virtual interlining. We search across a huge number of city pairs (about 130,000!) and need to get all of this data in a very short amount of time. But people are also key to our success - each quarter, we meet with the Amadeus team and work hand-in-hand to come up with personalized solutions that fit our needs. Because this was truly a joint effort, we called our technology "Kiwideus", a combination of Kiwi and Amadeus. If not for Amadeus listening to what we needed, we wouldn't have been able to achieve the levels of booking and searching that are key to our products being successful.

Both Kiwi and Amadeus share technology in our DNA. When we speak to Amadeus about the challenges we're having and what we hope to achieve, it's completely in sync from one technology company to another. We are both trying to solve problems and make travel better for the traveler through brilliant ideas and cutting-edge, reliable technology.

At Kiwi.com, we're constantly working to diversify our offer. Thanks to our partnership with Amadeus, we ensure that the traveler can book any kind of content easily and cost effectively and the Live Travel Space has been an integral part of that.

This press release was sourced from Amadeus on 29-May-2019.