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Recorded at CAPA Airline Leader Summit, 17-18 May 2018

Social Media Lab: Data Is The New Oil, Or Rather The New Soil For The Business Ecosystem

Social Media Lab director Andreas Weigend shares his expertise on the rise of, and future of, big data, social media technologies and consumer behaviour. He highlights that in today’s digitalised world consumers are sharing data in unprecedented ways and this social data revolution represents a deep shift in how people make purchasing and lifestyle choices. He advises airlines and the travel sector to ’embrace transparency’ as ‘if you’re not doing it, someone else will be on your behalf’.

Transcript

Andreas WeigendData has been a buzzword for decades. I did my PhD in neural networks in '91 at Stanford and we thought that was the time when actually data finally made it. Little did we know at the time that the World Wide Web would someday be invented. So data is the new oil, or as some say, maybe the new soil, for an ecosystem in which things can develop. That is true for the airline space as well. If you think about it, ultimately airlines are a data business. From fuel hedges to frequent flyer programs, all these are data planes.

So it's not so much about the interpretation of data, although I agree with you that indeed every data needs to be interpreted. What matters is what you do with it, what the actions are that you take. Not the actionable outcomes consultants might sell you, but the actual actions that you take.

I mean, my favorite example is why am I, Star Alliance, Lufthansa, am I the more frequent traveler, as opposed to my home airline, San Francisco United? 'Cause of this very smart data play that in order to get the single seats in business class on Swiss, between SFO and Zurich, you have to be a gold member of Miles And More. So that's an example, not of big data, but of small data, of people carefully thinking through incentives. Ultimately what we have seen the last decade or two is, that as many costs have come down, as many things have gotten commoditized, what's left is companies competing on incentives. And I personally think that's great, that it's not in the friction where things get absorbed, but in the things which you really want or not. But creating transparency about the things that matter to you, being able to actually look into those data refineries called airlines, that is I think what one of the important changes that we, as customers, have seen.

Embrace transparency. If you're not doing it, somebody else will being doing it on your behalf.

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