Aviation faces a dystopia of being dictated to about what the future of travel looks like, or the utopia of collaborating and forging the future it wants.

That was the message from Amadeus president of travel Decius Valmorbida at the Trip.com Airline Global Conference in Amsterdam this week.

Valmorbida, who spoke about making travel more seamless and what that may look like, likened the challenge to the impact that Amazon has had on general retailing.

He said the tech giant has spent billions of dollars to define how digital commerce operates bringing together a “coalition of suppliers”.

But he said there remains a question over whether those suppliers had a choice and participated willingly or had no choice as Amazon emerged as the dominant force.

Valmorbida said what the customer is “expecting is something very simple, seamless travel. We would like to travel with no friction”.

Although seamless travel might seem like an oxymoron, like governmental efficiency or common sense, Valmorbida said the challenge is how is it achieved.

“A lot of times when we’re talking about doing seamless, the closest examples in other industries will be what the very big tech giants were able to come up with.

“An example in retail is Amazon. What was the formula that Amazon used? Billions of investment in technology to make everything digital.

“Remember, they started as a bookstore and they created a process where from books to groceries to whatever other retail category had to adapt to the Amazon way.

“And they built a coalition of suppliers that were willing to participate. But were they really willing to participate on the Amazon revolution or there was no alternative?

“If we want to build seamless travel we could have it two ways. We could have an emerging player…coming and telling all of us how to work. That would be the dystopia.

“Or we’re going to go into the utopia set-up, which means that we found the way of actually collaborating, all of us getting together and saying, let’s collaborate.

“How do we go about going down the utopia path? Let’s imagine a world of collaboration. What do we need in order for us to collaborate?”

Valmorbida said it requires “huge investments in technology”. He claimed Amadeus on its own invests $2 billion a year compared to Amazon’s $100 billion, and all the tech budgets in the room added together probably would not be a match.

“How are we going to do this, how are we going to deliver a digital Amazon experience in technology?

“It requires us to stop double investing. It requires us to collaborate. If we’re going to collaborate, how do we make open systems? And that is the journey that we are on.

“Let’s look at the mirror and how we ourselves at Amadeos can build new systems.

“We’re talking about refreshing of our entire technology stack, but in a way that is modular, in a way that…we make it a unique platform that is traveller centric, and can reduce the costs of working with each other.

“If we can make the costs of integrating to each other smaller, it means that we can start to cooperate in the favour of travel.

“We have the framework. We have the technology. So what is missing?  We’re missing the willingness to participate. How do we create the willingness to participate in a market that we so vigorously compete in?

“What is the number one thing that requires us to start on that journey and create the willingness?

“Trust, and that’s the opportunity we all have here, if we come out of this conference trusting in each other and saying that the traveller does not belong to anyone in particular, the traveller is sovereign.”