Photo Credit: Delta flight attendants use Nokia Lumia 1520 devices on board. Delta Air Lines / PRNewsFoto
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The aviation industry is sitting on a bundle.
The wealth of information available to airlines, and the potential revenue airlines can gain from Big Data is beyond measure. Airlines have an opportunity to use passenger information to revolutionize the passenger experience—if they could only figure out how.
With millions of passengers traveling every day, millions making bookings, and more potential travelers scouring travel sites and airline sites for the best deals, a googol data points are gathered daily; where they are trapped in data Silos to age and perish—the gold they represent squandered.
Though in measured words, characteristic of their big-picture, reserved, IT-friendly personas, this is what Boxever’s VP of Sales, Ultan O’Brian, and VP of Marketing, Allyson Pelletier, impressed upon us when we spoke to them about Big Data and aviation.
The reason for this waste is two-fold. Big Data at airlines is very big. IT departments at airlines, however, are not. Putting Big Data to work, allowing airlines to free that revenue from their silos, and improve the passenger experience, is such a big concept that many airlines have trouble figuring out where to start.
“Airlines recognize at an executive level that Big Data can improve services,” O’Brian tells Skift. “If they mine data, they’ll find gold but they’re not putting gold to use. It needs a bit of alchemy to get it right. Many airlines feel they can do this in-house, by recruiting data analysts. Some are succeeding, but other airlines are not ready. They’re trapped in a retail mentality.”
“Gathering the data is important,” Pelletier says. “But trying to bring that data together, and being able to use it to actively engage with the customer is the objective.”
There are many silos in aviation: the reservations systems, the email systems of customer service representatives, the intelligence and feedback gathered through social media, web-site data, and operational data. They have different operating systems, different methods by which the data is gathered and stored. Then, there is the ultimate compendium of silos: the silos of the customer-contact personnel (the check-in staff, lounge staff, gate staff and crew) whose interactions with the customer are one-to-one leaving the intelligence gathered from those interactions unrecorded.
This Big
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