Amadeus API Integration: Practice Guide on Getting the GDS Content

What differentiates a travel professional from an occasional traveler? The latter thinks that the word Amadeus relates to Mozart’s music. The former would insist that Amadeus plays the first fiddle, but in the travel tech industry.

Amadeus, a Madrid-based travel giant,  grows its business around two areas — the global distribution system (GDS) and IT solutions for automating travel processes. In this article, we’ll focus on the GDS part that serves as a mediator between travel providers and travel vendors.

AltexSoft has broad hands-on experience implementing GDS APIs. Previously, we shared our lessons learned from Sabre API integrations. Now, let’s switch to Sabre’s key rival and the peculiarities you’ll inevitably face when dealing with the Amadeus platform.

What is Amadeus GDS?

Amadeus GDS is a global distribution system with a market share of over 40 percent among the top three GDSs (the other two are Sabre and Travelport). Created in 1987 by Air France, Iberia, Lufthansa, and SAS as a European alternative to the American Sabre GDS, it now services travel businesses worldwide.

Among Amadeus’s clients are online travel agencies (OTAs), travel management companies (TMCs), host travel agencies, air consolidators, and other travel resellers. They can search, compare, and book inventory via a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) — namely

• flight booking APIs that give access to deals from over 400 airlines, including 130 low-cost carriers (LCCs), ancillary services, and fare families;
• hotel booking APIs connecting to over 2 million lodging options and 650,000 unique properties;
• cars and transfers APIs linking with 90+ car rentals and transfer providers  that cover 43,500 locations worldwide;
• rail booking APIs with content from 25 rail operators;
• travel insurance APIs for booking and shopping from 25 insurance groups; and
• other travel APIs.

Amadeus was the first GDS to allow their content to be reached via APIs back in 2000. Watch our video if you need information on what an API is and why this technology is so important.

Now, all Amadeus APIs for web and mobile applications fall into two large groups — Self-Service and Enterprise. The AltexSoft team worked with both types. Below, we’ll discuss their qualities and what it takes to integrate them into your project.

Self-Service APIs: an easy way to launch a small travel project

The Amadeus Self-Service APIs rely on modern REST architectural style and JSON format for data exchange. They were introduced quite recently as an easy and inexpensive way for businesses without travel agency certifications to tap into GDS technologies and quickly launch travel startups.

The number of REST APIs by Amadeus is constantly growing, so now they can power flight, hotel, and tour booking engines and help you create apps for planning and buying trips. Watch our video to get a grip on how booking engines work.

The Self-Service API catalog: content and functionality

As of 2025, the Self-Service suite comprises 30 APIs, organized into five categories.

Flight APIs let you compare offers from over 400 airlines, automate the flight booking process, incorporate seat selection, and find the cheapest dates or destinations from a given city. However, keep in mind, that the catalog provides access only to public fares  — private or negotiated rates are available exclusively through the Enterprise tier.

You can also integrate advanced AI features — such as airport autocomplete search, dynamic pricing or personalized recommendations based on historical customer data of those with similar profiles.

Destination experience APIs return information about the best tours and attractions (T&A) available in a given location. The T&A API is powered by Amadeus Discover, a B2B platform aggregating offers from leading experience and ticket marketplaces like Viator or Tiqets. Note, though that the Self-Service version has limited capanilities: The full functionality is available with a separate Amadeus Discover API.

Market insights APIs help agencies identify the most frequently booked destinations and the busiest travel periods. This data offers valuable visibility into traveler behavior, booking patterns, and seasonal peaks — all of which support more informed decision-making.

Cars and Transfers APIs connect resellers to local and global mobility providers, automate the transfer booking process, and give agents full control to modify or cancel reservations when needed.

Hotel APIs support the full booking flow across more than 150,000 properties worldwide. They return search results enriched with detailed descriptions and photos. Agencies can also access granular rating data — covering everything from location and staff to amenities like the pool or Wi-Fi.

How to build integrations with Self-Service APIs

To start using Self-Service APIs, you simply create an account and, once approved, register your application. From there, you’ll receive an API key and secret. These credentials are used to generate an alphanumeric token that verifies you as an authorized user and gives you access to API calls in the sandbox.
Amadeus provides engineers with the test environment, code samples, and SDKs that simplify API embedding. Look through the official GitHub repository to find libraries and SDKs that will help you implement APIs in Ruby, Python, Java, Node.js, .NET, Kotlin (Android development), and Swift (iOS development).

Regardless of the language you use, you can test and fine-tune your integrations on a limited dataset with a fixed number of free calls that Amadeus provides each month (from 1,000 to 10,000, depending on the API). The sandbox environment allows your application to make up to 10 requests per user per second.

“The best thing about some Self-Service APIs is that, under the hood, they make several transactions to respond to a single request,” explains Ivan Mosiev, Solution Architect at AltexSoft, who dealt with Amadeus APIs on many travel projects. “Amadeus hides this complexity from developers, saving them time and making their work much easier. For example, you need to integrate only one endpoint instead of three or four to finalize the booking.”

The entire flight booking flow consists of three consecutive calls

• Search (returns flight offers);
• Price (confirms the availability and price of the selected flight); and
• Book (creates a flight order).

Within this flow, a developer deals with the same object (request) updating it with new details at each step. “You don’t need to change or shift any fields in the object,” says Ivan Mosiev. “You just receive the response from the first API, add a bit of information, and send it to the next endpoint. This simplifies development since you don’t have to create each request from the ground up.”

To better understand and test how flight bookings, hotel bookings, and other workflows operate, developers can use official prototypes (demo apps). There are also many community-built prototypes, though these are not maintained or supported by Amadeus.

How to move an app to production

Once your app is ready to go live, you can deploy it to the production environment, where it will process real data, and the allowed number of calls will increase from 10 to 40 per user per second.

This transition involves two steps:

1. Request submission. You’ll fill out a form with basic business and application details, choose a payment method (credit card or bank transfer), provide billing information, and sign the Terms of Service via DocuSign. After completing these steps, your app status will switch to pending.

2. Validation. Validation for the first app may take up to 72 hours; all subsequent apps are validated automatically and much faster. Once your request is reviewed and approved, you’ll receive your production keys and the app status will change to live.

This process applies to all Self-Service products except those that include the Flight Create Orders API, which completes the air booking flow. To use this API in production, you must meet additional requirements:

• comply with local regulations;
• ensure the API is permitted in your country; and
• sign an agreement with an airline consolidator.

So, what does an airline consolidator have to do with a flight booking app? You can’t issue flight tickets without accreditation from the Airline Reporting Corporation (ARC) in the US or the International Air Transport Association (IATA) elsewhere.

At the same time, small travel agencies and newcomers often lack the resources to be licensed by IATA or ARC. A common solution is partnering with a host agency or an airline consolidator that handles ticketing for a commission. Amadeus helps find the middleman for those who don’t know where to start. If you already have an IATA/ARC-accredited partner, it must be approved by the GDS.

Where to get help

Amadeus provides detailed and clear API documentation to guide you through the integration process, along with a frequently updated FAQ page addressing common questions.

However, the GDS does not offer phone or live chat support for the Self-Service API catalog. If you need assistance, you can reach out to their support team via email.

For further help, you can join the Amadeus for Developers community, which has over 3,430 members on Discord, or visit StackOverflow, where more than 370 technical questions on Amadeus API integrations are already discussed. Amadeus also has an official page on GitHub.

Pricing conditions

With the Self-Service subscription, you develop your app for free. When going live, you preserve the same quota of free calls as in the test environment. But on exceeding this limit, the system will automatically charge a fee for each transaction (roughly $0.003 to $0.046, depending on the API).  Each month, you will be automatically billed for any transactions that exceed the free quota.

The pay-as-you-go model works well for companies with a small number of clients. But as your business grows and attracts more travelers, the Self-Service price terms stop being advantageous. Besides that, you may want to augment your app with features unavailable in the current subscription. These factors induce companies to consider Enterprise APIs.

Enterprise APIs: a full-fledged service for large travel businesses

AltexSoft began working with Amadeus before the launch of the democratic Self-Service catalog. At that time, only large travel players certified by ARC or IATA could access GDS content through the older SOAP APIs.

Today, Amadeus is gradually transitioning from SOAP to REST, but this process is still ongoing. As a result, to access most of the features, you still need to use SOAP and meet the requirements for the Enterprise subscription. In addition to broader functionality, enterprise clients benefit from customized pricing, 24/7 technical support, and a dedicated manager to address their needs.

The Enterprise API catalog: content and functionality

The modern Enterprise catalog includes more than 140 APIs, including those available via the Self-Service proposition. Crucial content and capabilities provided by this subscription and unavailable through Self-Service are as follows.

Extended flight content. The Self-Service API catalog doesn’t include flights from American Airlines, Delta, British Airways, or low-cost carriers. To access this broader inventory, you need to upgrade to the Enterprise subscription. This tier also unlocks negotiated fares and other special or private deals.

NDC content. Access to New Distribution Capability (NDC)  products is available only through the Enterprise subscription. NDC, an initiative by IATA, enables airlines to modernize retailing through third-party platforms — offering personalized deals, bundles, richer ancillaries, detailed descriptions, photos, and more. Today, the GDS provides NDC content from more than 35 airlines.

The specifics of integrating with NDC APIs are that each connection from the technical perspective will be unique: the NDC booking flow is not fully standardized by Amadeus, different airlines support different NDC capabilities, and many details are not documented.

“What works for one carrier may not work for another,” explains Andrey Dudnik, a software engineer at AltexSoft, who integrated Amadeus APIs for a large OTA in the Middle East. “Therefore, when integrating a new NDC airline, you have to retest the entire flow and allocate time for bug fixes. In other words, 70-80% of the process will be the same, but the remaining 20-30% will require adjustments. For example, even something as basic as baggage information is returned in different places in the response depending on the airline.”

Ticketing services at booking time. As we’ve explained before, the Self-Service tier is designed for businesses without travel accreditations. They aren’t authorized to perform airline ticketing and have to partner with a consolidator to sell flights. In turn, the enterprise clients have the required credentials to issue and manage e-tickets and Amadeus provides them with the technical means to automate all aspects of this process.

Booking management. This set of REST and SOAP APIs enables you to create flight and ancillary bookings and manage a Passenger Name Record or PNR — search, retrieve, and display it; modify, add, and cancel PNR elements; and more. Watch our video to dive deeper into the meaning and purposes of a PNR.

Insurance. Two APIs in this category enable you to search and book travel insurance products matching given parameters. You can either build a dedicated application or sell protection plans via your current platform.

Payment by Outpayce. The integration with Outpayce  — a payment company focused on the travel industry and owned by Amadeus IT Group  — enable agencies acting as merchant of record to issue and manage virtual credit cards, streamlining payments to travel suppliers.

Rail. The set of three SOAP APIs can fuel a standalone railway reservation system or a rail-related module of the travel platform.

How to build integrations with Enterprise APIs

Unlike the Self-Service subscription, which allows you to access GDS APIs almost instantly without any preconditions, the Enterprise level requires you to meet certain standards (such as being IATA/ARC certified) and involves lengthy negotiations that can last for weeks or even months. Contact Amadeus experts through their contact form for more information.

After signing a contract, you’ll be allowed to build and test your integrations against test data in the Enterprise APIs sandbox. You can take advantage of developer-friendly REST APIs as far as they cover the functionality you want to implement. Then, switch to SOAP — Amadeus supports combinations of REST and SOAP products.

Typically, the Web Service Description Language is used to explain the technical details of SOAP APIs to a client app. You can generate implementation code from WSDL files and, this way, automate the integration process to some extent. Nevertheless, SOAP APIs remain difficult to work with since they are

• based on a verbose XML message format instead of JSON;
• less flexible than REST;
• not orchestrated, which means that you usually have to make several requests to complete a single operation; and
• poorly described — the API documentation for the Amadeus SOAP catalog leaves much to be desired.

“When building SOAP-based workflows, you need to create several requests within one session,” shares Ivan Mosiev his experience working with the Amadeus SOAP catalog. “This increases the likelihood of failure since something can go wrong between requests — say, an error on our side or the side of Amadeus, or a network outage. As a result, you have to write many more lines of code to consider all non-standard situations that can happen during the session.”

Interactions with SOAP APIs will be less painful if you hire the development team practiced at Amadeus Enterprise integrations. This will save you the trouble of doing time-consuming research and learning from common mistakes.

How to move an app to production

Before going live, your app must be certified by Amadeus. The GDS checks how well your technology works with their Enterprise APIs and thus protects them from incorrect usage. The certification process is inevitable even for those who have acquired a ready solution. Unlike with the Self-Service subscription, it takes weeks rather than days.

For developers, the certification involves the following steps:

• make a sequence of requests to model several standard situations (for Flight APIs it will be a one-way trip from destination A to destination B for one person; a round trip for one person; the same trips for two adults and a family with a child and infant);
• sign each call with your unique ID;
• send the log with requests and responses to Amadeus;
• wait for feedback;
• consider comments, correct mistakes, send another log; and
• wait again.

Waiting is typically the longest part of the entire procedure. And, in the flight booking integration, the majority of issues and comments fall on the interval between booking and ticketing. In the Self-Service subscription, this part is covered by an authorized consolidator, so the validation period lasts much less time.

The good news for enterprise clients interested in flight booking is that once you’ve implemented the main workflow from search to ticketing, adding other features — like seat maps — will be relatively fast.

When, after multiple iterations, you eventually get certified, Amadeus switches integrations to the production environment and lets them work with real data.

“The GDS configures your account depending on your target region,” shares Andrii Chebotarov, Managing Director of Travel and Transportation Competency Consulting at AltexSoft. “Search requests for this region will return the most recent prices and actual information on availability, while for other territories, search results can be of lower quality.”

Where to get help

The enterprise subscription comes with a service level agreement or a contract between you and Amadeus that defines the volume of tech support you can expect.

As a general rule, the GDS provides a dedicated account manager and support team to assist with inquiries, configurations, account settings, and any issues that may arise. Whether you’re in the development or production phase, you can reach out to Amadeus experts when something isn’t functioning as expected.

The speed of response often depends on your company’s size: the larger your company, the more prompt the assistance. For bigger clients, there may also be additional preferences in how service is provided.

For example, as Andrey Dudnik explains: “Since our client was one of the key players in the Middle East region, Amadeus agreed to hold regular online calls where we could explain our issues, and their representatives helped us understand what was going wrong.”

Pricing conditions

Enterprise clients pay a monthly fee negotiated in the contract for access to the system. This fee includes support services and a free request quota. Once you exceed it, you’ll pay for each subsequent call. However, Amadeus customizes pricing according to your needs.

“The essential point is that Amadeus charges a constant commission for using Enterprise APIs but your variable fees will be lower,” according to Andrii Chebotarov's comparison of the two subscriptions. If your app handles thousands of transactions you’ll eventually pay less than with the Self-Service model for the same volumes.

The pricing terms can depend on your look-to-book ratio showing how many site visitors make actual purchases with you. If your customers just browse offerings and book nothing, the conditions for calling APIs can be changed to be less beneficial.

Questions to answer before integrating with Amadeus API

In addition to all the above, we’d like to clarify three questions that all travel businesses considering GDS integrations usually ask themselves and their tech partners.

How do offerings from GDSs differ?

Today, travel‑businesses can choose among the three major GDS platforms — Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport. Although all three now distribute flights, hotels, car rentals, and other travel products, each has developed a stronger historical presence in specific regions. Amadeus is widely regarded as a strong choice for Europe, the Middle East, and Asia‑Pacific; Sabre for North America and Latin America; and Travelport for agencies seeking broad global reach.

That said, these are generalizations — the three major GDSs offer similar coverage, while the key difference lies in the contractual relationships and terms that can be negotiated for your target region. This is why American OTAs often use Amadeus, while European and Middle Eastern platforms tend to prefer Sabre.

Who needs a second GDS?

Suppose you already use Sabre or Travelport. When might the need for a second GDS arise, and why? One reason could be to integrate Amadeus as a backup GDS for improved system stability. However, don’t expect it to double your coverage or provide significantly more content. Using two GDSs in parallel will likely only add about five percent more information to what you already have with one.

On the other hand, the largest OTAs often use all three GDSs to maximize coverage and gain operational flexibility. Additionally, a multi-GDS strategy can be a valuable tool for negotiating better terms with your key content providers.

Will GDS APIs become easier to integrate in the future?

Definitely, yes. Slowly but surely, all GDSs move from SOAP to REST APIs. And, according to feedback from our developers, Amadeus REST APIs are perfectly documented and simple to work with.

But even if and when the complicated SOAP protocol becomes a thing of the past, the domain expertise and practice at GDS API integrations will still matter a lot when developing travel apps. Engineers familiar with GDS specifics and key travel concepts and processes will save you much time and money.