Often companies may purchase tickets to events, such as sporting events, to entertain guests, visiting executives, high-performing employees, or other appropriate recipients. If not well managed, ticket purchases may become an excessive expense. Also, often event tickets must be purchased in blocks for best pricing. However, not all purchasers can find recipients for all tickets, leaving some tickets unused or given away at random, and thus a wasted expense.
What is clearly needed is a system and method for managing purchase and inventory of such event tickets in a way that is most economical and beneficial to the company.
A method and system are described for event and service inventory management. One embodiment comprises: in response to a user request for tickets to an event, searching a database for available tickets of a set of tickets purchased prior in time; displaying to a user information about booked but unused tickets; and, in response to identifying unused tickets, allowing the user to book the available event tickets, without the user having received separate authorization to obtain tickets to the event.
In the following detailed description of embodiments of the invention, reference is made to the accompanying drawings in which like references indicate similar elements, and in which is shown by way of illustration specific embodiments in which the invention may be practiced. These embodiments are described in sufficient detail to enable those skilled in the art to practice the invention, and it is to be understood that other embodiments may be utilized and that logical, mechanical, electrical, functional, and other changes may be made without departing from the scope of the present invention. The following detailed description is, therefore, not to be taken in a limiting sense, and the scope of the present invention is defined only by the appended claims.
In some cases, the system would also calculate the “internal usage value” vs. the “external street value” for the owner. The “internal usage value” is the perceived value of having some employee of the company using the ticket or ticket block to entertain a client or for some other purpose. This can be calculated based on a variety of inputs. For example, a VP or above requesting it gives the ticket 50 points, the importance of the client can given n more points, the availability of other similar tickets gives the ticket value m more points, etc. The total is the “internal usage value”.
The “external street value” can be calculated by an algorithm that takes into account the original price of the ticket, the rate at which the event sold out, the current availability of tickets on the primary and secondary markets, number of other people requesting similar tickets, current bid price for such a ticket, etc.
Comparing the internal value vs. the external value can help a company determine if and when it should sell previously purchased tickets on the open market, providing an opportunity to effectively offload unused tickets at the right price and the right time and to determine which tickets should be offloaded.
It is clear that many modifications and variations of this embodiment may be made by one skilled in the art without departing from the spirit of the novel art of this disclosure.
The processes described above can be stored in a memory of a computer system as a set of instructions to be executed. In addition, the instructions to perform the processes described above could alternatively be stored on other forms of machine-readable media, including magnetic and optical disks. For example, the processes described could be stored on machine-readable media, such as magnetic disks or optical disks, which are accessible via a disk drive (or computer-readable medium drive). Further, the instructions can be downloaded into a computing device over a data network in a form of compiled and linked version.
Alternatively, the logic to perform the processes as discussed above could be implemented in additional computer and/or machine readable media, such as discrete hardware components as large-scale integrated circuits (LSI's), application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC's), firmware such as electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM's); and electrical, optical, acoustical and other forms of propagated signals (e.g., carrier waves, infrared signals, digital signals, etc.); etc.
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