Airlines Are Trying to Get Personal With Your Data

Delta Air Lines recently gave 22,000 flight attendants new Nokia Lumia smartphones to help handle sales of food, drinks and on-board seat upgrades. Ho-hum news. However, there was a more intriguing tidbit in the airline’s news release: “In the future, Delta expects to provide flight attendants with certain customer-specific information to enable more personalized service.”

Delta — and nearly all its rivals — is working to know its passengers more intimately as a way to bolster profits. In the race to differentiate their product, compete beyond price, and become more sophisticated merchants, airlines are looking forward to a day when they can exploit the enormous data trove amassed in the course of routine business. Armed with that information — a customer’s spending, seat preferences, preferred hub connections, flight patterns, booze choices, frequent-flier mileage use and much else — the idea behind “personalization” is that a company can engender greater loyalty, induce people to spend larger sums and possibly even make flying more enjoyable. Read more...