Airline revenue management around sporting mega-events: an application using data from the Super Bowl XLIX

Using air travel ticketing data for the travel dates around the 2015 Super Bowl in Phoenix, AZ, we exploit the exogenous shock created by the National Football Leagure conference championship round results and design a quasi-natural experiment to identify market-specific airfare and booking patterns. Our findings help quantify the impact on the resolution in uncertainty by measuring the changes in airfare and bookings, before and after the conference championship games, in the airline markets of finalist teams and teams that lost in the conference championship round. This empirical evidence provides important insights to airlines.