The promise of massaging big data to help organizations get better insight into their operations has taken hold. And among the industries that have huge stocks of data is the airline sector — think of the thousands of names, credit card numbers, hotel and flight information collected hourly. But combine that with analyzing social media posts and you could get big savings.
Which is why the Sabre reservation system hopes mining all that information could help its airline, travel agent and hotel subscribers do a better job. This piece from TechRepublic gives a peek at what it has in mind.
As writer Nick Heath reports, Sabre’s research and development lab has built a social-media analytics application that would allow airlines to spot the probable disruption of flights by hurricanes faster than current systems do. How? By searching Twitter and Facebook posts for mentions of hurricanes and combining that information with weather-service forecasts.
The problem with many social media posts is they can be unreliable, filled with gossip, speculation and a few ounces of revenge. But chatter about weather should be relatively reliable. We’ll see if this venture gets off the ground.