“Our decision to distribute our fares through Amadeus was, first of all, a matter of a reduction in distribution costs. For Amadeus’s part, it was their innovation and fresh thinking that made it possible for us to use Amadeus as a channel for distribution while still retaining our way of doing things,” he explains.

Embraced by travel agencies
Low-cost carriers with limited distribution outside their own websites and call centres have been around for many years, but this regime is at an end.

“I think that travel agencies have been screaming about this for years, because they have not been able to distribute low-cost carriers in an efficient way,” says Hansen. “Sterling’s presence in Amadeus means that they can now compare the fares from the different airlines on one single screen, giving the customers a wider choice. Some of the larger agencies have built applications on top of Amadeus to book Sterling and have worked their way around the problem. However, smaller travel agencies simply cannot bear the development costs of such solutions. Ultimately, Sterling’s new booking solution makes it easier for everyone to book Sterling

for their customers.”

More inbound traffic
Awareness of Sterling has so far been limited outside Scandinavia, and Hansen believes that its presence in Amadeus will increase Sterling’s inbound traffic.

“Presence in Amadeus will help us to market our product in central and southern Europe,” he says. “We plan to stick with Amadeus because they have the widest range of selling points in Europe, and at the same time we want to standardise and simplify our operation by offering our fares through a single GDS,” concludes Hansen.

Sterling is Scandinavia’s first low-cost airline, operating direct routes between Scandinavia and southern Europe, and also within Scandinavia itself. Sterling flies to the following destinations in Scandinavia: Copenhagen, Billund, Oslo, Stavanger, Bergen, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. During 2004, Sterling flew 1,825,206 passengers between Scandinavia and southern Europe.