There is a great game of one-upmanship in the Middle East.
So why should GDS be any different. After the blockbuster announcement earlier this year of Emirates subsidiary Mercator and its company Emquest forming a JV to market Sabre in GCC, MENA and certain other markets in Africa - Etihad has formed a JV with Amadeus that will be 51% owned by the Abu Dhabi based airline.
There is even more. The big loser in all of this has been Travelport who on Jan 1st 2009 loses the AACO Arab Air Carriers Organization GDS based contract to Amadeus.
Travelport was somewhat unaware of the play that Amadeus pulled with the AACO airlines. Sabre realized that their relationship with Gulf Air - formerly their sales agent in the GCC - known as Falcon was also not going anywhere.
The GCC is one of the very few markets where the still GDS makes sense and is a growing market. In the mature markets the GDS model is slowly but surely falling back as we see in North America and Europe.
Still a lot to play for. The competition will be fun in that market - that is for sure.
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