Apple spends $150M on United Airlines annually, leaked documents show
Apple is United Airlines’ biggest corporate customer, spending $150 million each year on business flights around the world, according to the airline’s internal documents that leaked to social media last weekend.
Photos of a United Airlines promotional banner revealed the tech giant books 50 business class seats to Shanghai, China, every day. China is home to many of Apple’s main parts suppliers and manufacturing hubs. Other top Apple flight destinations include Hong Kong, Taipei and London.
The internal materials also named Facebook, Google and Roche as top corporate customers, with annual spending of more than $34 million each. Other companies named as top spenders included Deloitte, Oracle and Cisco.
The information was meant for a program for United employees on the importance of corporate relationships and “was not intended to be shared publicly,” a United spokesperson said in a statement.
“A small group of customers were mentioned by name on this material and each has been contacted directly and we are working to address their concerns. The material has been taken down and moving forward we will review and further restrict sharing of internal customer information to a strictly need to know audience,” the statement added.
Apple declined to comment.
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The original photo, shared by Twitter user @LAflyer, has since been taken down for copyright reasons. The documents did not detail the flight habits of companies other than Apple.