Google is paying $10 million for the insides of a dead airline. Not its planes, not its slots, not its brand. Its emails, its code and its booking curve. If that does not make every travel brand rethink what its data is worth, nothing will. Because most of you are giving the same kind of knowledge to AI companies today, while you are still alive, for nothing.
On 10 November, Skift reported that Spirit Airlines’ proposed data sale to Google had cleared a major hurdle. The unions won extra privacy protections for staff, and a court hearing is set for 17 November. Reuters says Google won the auction in August, after Spirit stopped flying in May, and that it wants the data to train its AI models.
What $10 million buys
The shopping list is extraordinary. According to the court filing, as reported by Skift, Google gets roughly 1.9 billion internal emails across 91,000 accounts, 664 million Microsoft Teams items, 91 million SharePoint and OneDrive files and about 30 million lines of code. Then there is the commercial data: Spirit’s booking curve, its holiday package data and its airfare data.
Read that last part again. A booking curve is how an airline learns when people buy, how fast seats sell and when to push price. It is years of decisions about how travellers behave. That is exactly what an AI travel assistant needs to sound like it understands travel.
Google was not the only bidder either. The auction notice names Mercor, the AI training data company, as the back-up bidder at $7.5 million. Two AI buyers competed for an airline’s paperwork. There is a market here, and travel brands are not setting the prices.
The privacy fight is real. It is also not the main story
The unions were right to fight. The original deal protected customers better than employees. Now, Bloomberg Law reports, Tonic AI will deidentify the data, more employee records are excluded, and Google must commit not to knowingly reidentify anyone. Medical checks, payroll, drug tests, crew pairings and biometrics are out. A privacy ombudsman had already recommended removing personal details for 97 million Spirit customers, and around 120 US lawmakers raised concerns.
Good. But the bigger lesson for the rest of travel is commercial, not legal. Strip out every name and every passport number, and the data still has value. The value was never just who flew. It was how the business worked.
You are already selling this. You just forgot to send the invoice
Here is the uncomfortable part. Spirit’s data only became a $10 million asset when the airline died and a court had to put a price on it. Live travel brands hand AI companies the same kind of knowledge every day, and nobody asks what it is worth.
Your rate patterns sit on public pages that crawlers read. Your room descriptions, fare rules and FAQs train the models that will later answer your guests’ questions. As I wrote this week, most travel brands have not even decided which AI crawlers to let in. And as I argued when looking at why AI struggles to understand airline seats, the quality of your data decides what AI says about you.
I am not saying block everything. Being visible to AI matters, and hiding is a losing game. I am saying that visibility and value are different things. Public product data should be open and clean so AI can recommend you. Your demand data, your pricing logic and your customer behaviour are something else. They are the crown jewels, and they deserve a price, a contract and a purpose.
What travel brands should do now
- Split your data into two piles. What you want AI to repeat (product, policies, content) and what you would never give a competitor (booking curves, pricing rules, conversion data).
- Read your vendor contracts. Check whether your PMS, CRS, chatbot or analytics supplier can use your data to train models. Many terms are vaguer than you think.
- Ask what happens if you fail. Spirit shows that in bankruptcy, data is an asset to be sold. Your board should know what that asset is and who might buy it.
This is the same pattern I flagged when AI travel start-ups started being bought rather than funded. AI companies are not just building tools for travel. They are buying their way into how travel works, one dataset and one team at a time.
So here is my take, bluntly: Spirit’s real legacy will not be cheap fares. It will be the moment the travel industry learned what AI companies think its knowledge is worth. $10 million for an airline’s brain looks cheap to me. But it is still $10 million more than most travel brands are charging today.
Would you sell your booking data to an AI company — or have you already given it away?
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