Originally Posted by
jsloan
That sounds like revisionist history to me. I think frequent flyer programs were seen as a way to offload distressed inventory while increasing revenue -- give people free tickets for seats you weren't going to sell anyway in order to get them to choose you over the competition. If they just wanted a unique traveler ID, name + phone number likely would have worked fine.
Revisiting the book rather than relying on my memory while waiting for a train to Newark it seems I've oversimplified it and it is truly a bit of column a and a bit of column b (and quite a bit of "in the pre-9/11 era precise name matching wasn't really observed"). Fortunately the passage in question is available via Google Books
https://www.google.com/books/edition...sec=frontcover (bottom of page 155 on to page 156) -- even though the book is nearly 30 years old (and I wish Mr. Petzinger would do a "Part II" I find it really insightful into what airlines have evolved into today.
"Do we even know who our frequent customers are?" [Crandall's people] asked. THe answer was not really. Before the great travel agent onslaught of the 1970s [...] Sabre was programmed to search for multiple appearances of the same telephone number and periodically compile as list of the names associated with those numbers. (Surnames were too common and misspelled to frequently to be of much value in searching electronically) The telephone area code located the individual in a particular state; American then searched drivers's license records for addresses
[...]
But in the early 1980s the same phone numbers were showing up over and over, by the hundreds and thousands -- the phone numbers of travel agencies [....]. American no longer had a reliable way of identifying repeat passengers. Travel agents were standing in the way of American's contact with its customers.