About

Madrid-headquartered Amadeus IT Group began in 1987 as an agreement between four major European airlines – Air France, Lufthansa, Iberia, and SAS – to create an unbiased global distribution system (GDS) that would allow travel agencies and their clients to access travel data and make bookings. It has since evolved into one of the largest global providers of passenger service systems and is a major global player in a number of fields, including e-ticketing and airline industry e-commerce solutions, serving most major international airlines. Amadeus now has operations in over 100 countries, with regional headquarters in Miami, Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Dubai, and relies on a legal team of over 40 in-house lawyers distributed among its various offices to handle the range of legal and regulatory issues that confront the business. Data privacy and protection requirements form a big part of the team’s work, but the legal department has made a number of wider contributions to the company in recent years and has been at the forefront of Amadeus’ corporate sustainability initiatives, helping the company to feature in the prestigious Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the last five years. As part of its sustainability commitments, the team has recently been working with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to promote the use of carbon calculators and provide transparent information on the environmental impact of travel. The team is led by Tomás López Fernebrand, Amadeus’ general counsel and secretary to the board. López Fernebrand has been with Amadeus for nearly 30 years and assisted in founding the company’s two principal subsidiaries, France-based Amadeus Development and Germany-based Amadeus Data Processing.