By Anita Kobylinska
(Reuters) – Spanish travel booking group Amadeus said on Friday it returned to profitability in the third quarter after more than a year of consecutive quarterly losses as flight bookings picked up helped by growing vaccination rates and eased travel restrictions.
The company booked an adjusted net profit of 23.8 million euros in the third quarter compared with a 125 million euro loss in the same period a year ago.
Amadeus’s bottom line turned positive for the first time since the second quarter 2020 when it booked its first quarterly loss in a decade as the COVID-19 pandemic grounded airliners around the world.
The profit, however, was lower than the 38.8 million euro average expectation from analysts polled by Refinitiv.
The world’s biggest provider of travel booking services said it continued to see an uptick in the number of travelling passengers though the number of reservations made through Amadeus’s distribution platforms was still 59% below the 2019 levels.
($1 = 0.8655 euros)
(Reporting by Anita Kobylinska in Gdansk; Editing by Inti Landauro)
