Does AA Know How Often You Fly Other Airlines?
 

According to an article on the frontage on FT today, AA knows how often you fly on other airlines and who the high value customers are. Anybody know how they get this data? Or at least have a reasonable guess?

I'm thinking they might buy it form their credit card partners or mint.com. Or given the sad sate of Delta's IT, maybe there was a data breach (-;

It would know about flights where you used your AA FF number in the booking

Keeping track of high value customers on AA isn't that hard for AA

Generally, they won't know if you are flying WN or DL...

That makes a lot of sense. I just assumed they were seeing things across all airlines.

Article is not referring to people using AAdv #, it's AA tracking it's customer's activity on competitors like DL. Methods most of which I've never posted here.

That is, in fact, what they were actually referencing.

I use different CC's via different issuers for various purposes.......might be hard to track me, even Delta since I don't do AmEx. Absolutely not the Aviator Barclaycard though

If AA is tracking people who fly other airlines and pay for those flights using an AA-branded credit card, that seems pretty creepy. Maybe AA could track Admirals Club visits compared with dates of travel on AA flights, and even that's kind of creepy, but less creepy than monitoring credit card spending.

Here's a link to the Skift article that the FlyerTalk blurb references.

https://skift.com/2018/03/07/america...-a-competitor/

Here are some excerpts:

What we strive to do is use pretty clever data and analytics looking for customers that we have a pretty good hypothesis are high-value customers in another airline’s program. we’ve had significant success on doing that for some time.

I don’t know whose program they may be a part of.

Emphasis mine.

...

What we’re now doing is looking at, here are people who have left American. What were the attributes that we saw that led up to that? And then we mirror that on top of existing customers to say — I’m making these things up — if lose your bag more than twice, then your likelihood of defecting goes up by X percent. We take all of those different factors and we look at our at-risk list. Then we can go out and proactively talk to those customers, making sure we’ve appropriately compensated them.

Part of the consequences of Big Data, which has been apparent for some time.

Once data of any kind enters any connected computer system, it's there to be discovered, analyzed, compared to other data, spreadsheeted to death, massaged, manipulated, subjected to mathematical formulas, and on and on.

Forever.

This is fairly common across many industries. It may not yield 100% accurate data on every passenger, but that is not the point. One easy source of information are enrolled corporate TA's. If your employer has a corporate contract with AA, but not DL, understanding why people might book away from AA onto DL is worth knowing about. It also helps to target offers of all sorts.

Tracking consumer spending habits is what big data is all about.

Nice job piecing the article hitting all the main points. With big data you can really leverage to successfully identify trends, analyze probabilities, and take educated "bets" which will usually result in being right, or close to right, most of the time.

However, AA won't know if I am booking a Delta trip with my AMEX Platinum. But they can use data to analyze my trends with them [AA] and if they notice a negative deviation in my AA travel patterns then they can piece the puzzle together.

Credit card companies do sell aggregate data to many different firms, but I am somewhat confident its illegal to sell data on individual level based on my uneducated understanding.

I have absolutely no problem with AA knowing that I also fly Norwegian's "Premium" class between JFK and CDG, a Premium Economy at a fraction of the cost of AA for equal or better service, and I would have no problem using my AAviator CC to pay for the ticket (I don't because the Amex Platinum gives 5 points per $ spent). Sometimes it is good for airlines (especially the US Legacy...) to know that competition exists. This is how Caviar has just come back on AA's very long distance First Class after an absence of 30+ years.

Agreed. I'd love for AA to know more about why I fly other airlines, if only for the faint hope that they'd use that information to improve their offering.

That'd cut both ways if they knew I sometimes hopped over to Allegiant and Spirit to save money :)

Now I know why AA followed me on Instagram! :eek: :D