Amadeus has made good on its plans to furnish micro-donation technology to support the United Nations Children’s Fund. The travel technology firm teamed with Iberia to enable visitors to the airline's website to donate between €3 and €20 as they complete a ticket purchase. It's not the Amadeus-backed Massivegood project that had aimed (but failed) to engage the corporate travel community in a charitable fundraising initiative, but it's something.
Amadeus first publicized the UNICEF program in a corporate responsibility report published in the spring. "Through this global program we will put our technology to work for UNICEF, by deploying a donation engine solution on commercial travel websites," Amadeus had written. "Amadeus and UNICEF will reach out to travel sellers in selected markets, to engage them in the global initiative, in order for them to facilitate traveler donations on their commercial websites. Amadeus technical teams will support, host and maintain the donation engine solution at no cost to UNICEF or the travel sellers."
At that time, Amadeus senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary Tomás López Fernebrand had indicated that negotiations were ongoing "with several airlines including Iberia." He had added that the "the primary focus currently is airline websites, but the donation engine can also be rolled out to online travel sellers, including aggregators and online travel agencies, so the potential to scale this across multiple channels is significant."
An Amadeus spokesperson this week said the company is "in varying stages of discussions with travel industry partners around the world."
According to a prepared statement by Amadeus CEO Luis Maroto, "This alliance of UNICEF, Iberia and Amadeus has the virtue that all three are leaders in their respective fields, and possess a worldwide reach, so the potential to collect a large volume of donations is enormous."
A global advocate for children's health, nutrition education and safety, UNICEF is active in more than 190 countries and territories and is the leading provider of vaccines in developing countries. It is funded entirely by voluntary contributions from individuals, businesses, foundations and governments.