Amadeus Hospitality Is Making Bigger Hotel Deals as It Chases a Breakthrough
Photo Credit: Crowne Plaza is among the InterContinental Hotels Group brands that are slated to get a new guest reservation system from Amadeus Hospitality in 2018. Pictured are patrons at a Crowne Plaza property. Crowne Plaza
Skift Take
Amadeus' hospitality division is creating a back-end booking system for InterContinental Hotels Group. But it's not a foregone conclusion that the tech colossus will win over a swath of other hotels.
In 1992, then-college sophomore Lee Horgan did an internship at a hospitality services company, Newmarket Software, that his uncle had created in the mid-1980s.
After college, Horgan returned to what later was called Newmarket International and began doing work in sales and rose up the ranks to become chief executive. In late 2013, he helped to sell the company for $500 million to Amadeus, the travel technology colossus based in Madrid.
Since 2016, Horgan has been chief executive of Amadeus Hospitality, the hotel software division -- a collection of businesses, such as Hotel SystemsPro, Itesso, Libra, MeetingMatrix, and MTech, that Amadeus has acquired in the past half-dozen years.
Horgan is aiming to do for hotels what Amadeus has done for airlines in providing a full suite of solutions for running their operations.
But he and his team face potential pitfalls. The type of platform Amadeus Hospitality hopes to sell to the industry hasn't necessarily been successful before.
