How to decode an Amadeus PNR?

Amadeus is a major Global Distribution System (GDS) / Central Reservation System (CRS) owned by Amadeus IT Group (BMAD: AMS).

It is the largest provider in the travel and tourism industry offering a wide range of services for airports, airlines, hospitality, mobility, railways, cruises, ferry lines, and helping DMO(s) and Small & Medium Travel Agencies to grow.

What is an Amadeus PNR?

As discussed in our previous article, a PNR (Passenger Name Request) is an alpha-numeric code (6 characters) that uniquely identifies the traveler booking within the Amadeus GDS. As stated, the GDS Record Locator can be different than the Airline Record Locator. If the airline is backed by Amadeus then the internal record locator is the same as the airline record locator.

Besides the generic mandatory elements (itinerary, travelers, billing & contact information, ticketing arrangements, what they receive from data) there are some particularities, such as:

• All elements are numbered consecutively, making modifications easier.
• All names are displayed individually, even though two passengers may have the same family name.
• All names are displayed in alphabetical order by family name, regardless of the way they were entered during PNR creation.

We are not going to enter in too many details about the creation of a PNR and other technical aspects as they are already covered in the Amadeus training manual available here and in an online interactive course here.

How do I display and read an Amadeus PNR?

As stated both in the training manual and in the online video (see the previous section) we can easily display a direct PNR by entering RT<PNR> in the terminal. There are cases where we don’t know the PNR or we need to customize the PNR display, thus the system offers a wide range of options which can be used.

For example:

• RT/HESSE*A — List of PNRs by family name, active PNRs only
• RTTKT/016-1234567890 — Retrieve a PNR by Ticket Number
• RTM/LH-386427991 - By Frequent Flyer number or bonus number

After we have our recorder locator found and display, we can see at a glance the basic information about the traveler: names, segments, and other travel information easily detectable and read by a trained professional. For junior travel agents, the segments are raising the biggest challenge as they contain a lot of coded information such as:

3 BA 190 Q 14JUN 3 AUSLHR HK2             620P 950A+1 *1A/E*
4 BA 206 Y 10JUN 2 MIALHR NN15            450P 635A+1 744 E0M
5 BA1308 Q 15JUN 4 LHRABZ HK2         5  1210P 150P   *1A/E*

The information in the segment lines can be different based on the segment type but the common information can be identified as (first line explained)

How to decode an Amadeus PNR?

Nowadays the majority of Online Travel Agencies have their own Internet Booking Engines (IBEs) which covers all the operations from search to booking and even post-booking. Besides the core features and processes an IBE is responsible for presenting the flight information in a customer-friendly format by parsing segment data (airline IATA codes, airport IATA code, country ISO2 code, time zones, etc) and match it against an internal database in a matter of milliseconds.

The customer journey doesn’t end when the booking is complete and the electronic tickets are issued. There are cases when airlines are required to make changes to an itinerary and cases when a customer, due to multiple reasons, needs to do changes. In many of these cases, the manual intervention of the PNR is required by either a travel agent or by a Customer Service representative

Some of these changes are small changes such as: adding a missing piece of information, adding an ancillary service, upgrading to a different class or service; and some of them are major like in the case of a major schedule change when the airline is canceling some flights or changes departure/arrival times. In the case of major schedule changes or if the customer needs to change a departure date a completely new itinerary (an alternative) needs to be proposed to the customer for his approval.

These proposals, either for schedule changes or for offering other itineraries are done manually by the travel agent or customer service rep. Doing it manually requires a direct search in the GDS terminal, reading the segment information, and manually decode all those segment information (airline, airports, countries, timezone, etc).

Usually this process is completed during the next steps:

1. search segment availability in Amadeus GDS
2. trying to combine & marry different segments alternatives to meet customer requirements (departure or landing times, connecting airports, layover duration, etc)
3. merry and price the new segment combination
4. compose an email or a document where the new information, in a customer friendly format, is presented:
   1. read every segment data (airline, airport, country, terminal, time & dates, availability)
   2. lookup IATA Airline Codes online
   3. lookup IATA Airport Codes online
   4. lookup airport timezone offsets and differences
   5. repeat from #1 to #4 for every segment
   6. create nice tables & formats in either email or document
   7. add price & tax breakdowns
   8. send to customer

Teams all around the globe, in small or big online travel agencies, are doing this long process manually. Time gets consumed and mistakes can and will appear.

Our team had the same issues with all these repetitive lengthy tasks and in order to ease this process and help the travel agents and/or customer service representatives to be more efficient, we’ve launched otti SaaS.