Patent Application
20080091481
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.
After the traveler returns from his trip, in step 204, the system does a post-travel analysis to determine whether some of the penalties and fees invoked by travel changes could have been avoided or lowered had different types of bookings been made. These analysis results are also stored in database 104. In step 205, the system makes a fine-tuning of rules and suggestions, based on the historic aggregate of relevant travels of both this user and other users who followed the same route, and in step 206, the process ends. For example, a large event at a target location may have led to cancellations or changes in hotel reservations or overbooking of flights, and therefore to unacceptable delays or problems in users' travel plans. Thus the system may determine that the traveler should have initially purchased an unrestricted ticket, allowing him to avoid change penalties, etc.
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.
In some cases, a novel aspect of the software system includes attributes for a trip that the electronic services system would look at for both new and historical trips. Some example attributes of a trip could include the following: reason for trip (e.g., sales call, maintenance call, industry conference, internal meeting, etc.), specific parties involved in the trip (e.g., customer A, internal colleague B, industry conference C, etc.), specific location (e.g., a given city, convention center, or a property of a city such as being a European city or an Asian city), timing (e.g., time of year, the fact that the trip is on a Monday or Friday, proximity to a major holiday, etc.), proximity to other activities on a user's calendar (e.g., do other meetings in different cities tightly adjacent introduce additional travel change risk, do tentative, conflicting meetings on the user's calendar make a change more likely), user-defined priority of the event (e.g., the user could state that this is a Tier 1 customer or a Tier 2 customer, which could inform whether the trip is likely to change), and other attributes of the trip, both defined by the user and derived from the attributes of the proposed and past trips.
Additionally, in yet other cases, the system could offer a display of the same booking with different rate/restriction combinations. For example, a hotel room may be available at a given hotel with three options. Option A might have a large penalty for change and a pre-payment requirement, option B might have only a penalty if not cancelled 24 hours ahead, but a higher per night rate, and option C might have a slightly higher rate, but include amenities such as parking, breakfast, and Internet access. In these cases, a novel part of the system would be a display that shows a specific hotel with multiple booking options all in a tightly integrated display.
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 (LSl'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.).
This application is related to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/112,376, Filed Apr. 21, 2005, entitled, “Aggregate Collection Of Travel Data”, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/178,007, filed July 31, 2005, entitled, “System for Travel Services Resource U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/240,739, Filed Sep. 30, 2005, entitled “Method And System For Capturing And Calculating Complex Consumer Ratings Of Goods And Services” and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/240,740, filed Sep. 30, 2005 entitled: “Method And System For Testing Of Policies To Determine Cost Savings”, all of which are incorporated herein by reference.
