Why Google doesn’t need to sell air fares. It’s all about data. Facebook will be next

Airlines may be global businesses in many ways, as well as exhibiting cutting edge technology in areas like mobile phone check-in at airports and offering user-friendly websites for buying air tickets (along with a host of other "ancillary" items like hotels and car rental). But, when it comes to making use of the enormously rich data that they receive from the world's top 10% slice of spenders, the airlines are positively living in a Neolithic ecology. They are simply unable to extract and match the fabulously valuable information about passengers that they receive by the millions of items every day.