A sudden 45-minute glitch in a major airline software system triggered airport-wide check-in delays on Tuesday. Air India later confirmed the system stabilised and flights ran as scheduled.
The slowdown, airlines said, came from an issue in Amadeus, a software system used across the aviation industry.
What Is Amadeus?
Amadeus is one of the world's biggest travel-technology platforms. Airlines use it to run core operations, from booking tickets to managing check-ins, seat inventory, boarding, and departure control. Because these systems are interconnected, even a short outage can affect flight schedules and airport queues.
Amadeus essentially acts as the digital backbone for many airlines and travel agencies, making passenger processing fast and standardised across airports.
What Is The Global Distribution System?
A major part of Amadeus is its Global Distribution System (GDS). It is a platform that connects travel providers (like airlines, hotels, car rental companies, rail operators, and cruise lines) with travel sellers (such as travel agencies and online booking portals).
A GDS does two key things:
Acts as a marketplace - It brings together airlines, hotels, car rentals, cruise and rail operators, and presents their schedules, availability and fares in one place. This allows travel agents to compare prices and book services instantly without switching systems.
Provides tools for travel sellers - Most GDSs offer a booking interface for agents and APIs for online travel platforms. This lets sellers pull real-time data and issue tickets through a single, unified connection.
How A GDS Works
Search - A travel agent enters a query, like, a flight from Delhi to Mumbai.
GDS fetches live data - It connects to each airline's reservation and inventory system to check real-time seat availability and fares.
Booking - When the agent confirms a booking, the GDS creates it in the airline's reservation system.
Updates - Any changes or cancellations made through the GDS are updated instantly in the airline's system.
The GDS doesn't hold the inventory itself; it only connects to the provider's database.
Amadeus goes beyond GDS. It runs sophisticated Passenger Service Systems (PSS) for airlines: reservation systems, inventory control, departure-control (check-in and boarding), baggage-management tools, and more.
For airports, it may also offer solutions to manage gates, passenger flow, resource allocation.
How One Glitch Can Disrupt Airports
Centralised infrastructure - Amadeus acts as a central nervous system for many airlines. If its network or specific modules such as the check-in system go down, all dependent airlines lose access simultaneously.
High volume of traffic: Amadeus handles millions of bookings and check-ins daily. Any disruption, even brief, can overload fallback procedures or manual processes, leading to long queues and flight delays.
Interconnected operations: Booking, check-in, baggage, boarding, scheduling, these are all tightly integrated. Failure in one part (like check-in) can disrupt the whole chain.
Global scale of operations: Because Amadeus is used worldwide, a single outage may impact airlines and airports across continents, not just locally. Past incidents have shown delays at airports from London to Singapore.
