American Airlines flies its data warehouse to the cloud

The COVID-19 pandemic has been one of the biggest challenges in the history of American Airlines as air travel came to a standstill.

In a session at the Forrester Data Strategy and Insights 2021 virtual event on Nov. 18, Jason Newton, managing director of data engineering, analytics and automation at American Airlines, outlined how the organization changed the way it uses its data warehouse.

Newton detailed how the airline transformed its data use patterns over the course of the pandemic to benefit from cloud and real-time data insights using the Teradata Vantage platform.

“To have essentially all travel stop and then continue being suppressed for over a year has been a real challenge for us,” Newton said. “Our leadership team, though, had a great take on it from the very beginning, and they said let’s not waste a crisis, there are opportunities when you have to really buckle down and get into survival mode.”

American Airlines looked to identify different ways it could be more efficient and according to Newton, it became clear early on that data was the way to uncover new opportunities and change the way the airline made decisions.