But the most crucial advantage from Sabre surprised Crandall and his team. They were soon flooded with data no one had ever seen before: years of bookings, as one analyst noted, “from which American could deduce how many days in advance vacationers tended to book to San Juan, how many days in advance business travelers booked to Detroit, in May as opposed to September, on Tuesday as opposed to Friday.” Thirty years before Big Data became a Silicon Valley buzzword, American discovered big data. Crandall set up a division to use that data to extract maximum dollars per seat. The technique, as
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