SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR TRAVEL CARRIER CONTRACT MANAGEMENT AND OPTIMIZATION

• US 20060212320A1
• Filed: 06/05/2006
• Published: 09/21/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 04/20/2001
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Liberty Peak Ventures, LLC (Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC)
• Original Assignee: American Express Travel Related Services Company, Inc. (American Express Company)
• Inventors: Sauser, Olivier, Florio, Dionino
• Granted Patent: US 7,313,548 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 705/5
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/02 Reservations, e.g. for tickets, services or events
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/025 Coordination of plural reservations, e.g. plural trip segments, transportation combined with accommodation
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/04 Forecasting or optimisation specially adapted for administrative or management purposes, e.g. linear programming or "cutting stock problem" market predictions or forecasting for commercial activities G06Q30/0202
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/06375 Prediction of business process outcome or impact based on a proposed change
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/10 Office automation; Time management
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0283 Price estimation or determination

Abstract

A method and system for air carrier contract management and optimization is disclosed. In particular, the present invention receives and tracks client travel data and air carrier contract data, analyzes this data and configures the data structure to be used in a goal programming algorithm to determine an optimum travel carrier solution.

Claims

1. A method for facilitating travel carrier optimization comprising the steps of:

receiving data from a set of input parameters;

facilitating data quality control processing on said data;

preparing said data by subtracting rebates from spend to compute a base net-sector price;

defining constraint cells by at least one of airport pairs, class of service or ticket currency of origin;

calculating global monetary rebate on said cells;

computing global base spend;

building constraints from at least a portion of said data;

wherein upper or lower limits are added to establish the spend or sector for each carrier;

deriving a maximum potential number of sectors;

excluding the lowest value cells from a ticket data set;

calculating a maximum potential limit correction for each travel carrier and cell;

facilitating data quality controls, wherein low ticket prices are removed or the average sector price is adjusted to a mean value;

adding a sector filters data set;

adding a spend filters data set; and

executing a goal programming processor to determine an optimal solution.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising the steps of:

adding original data from the client data set to said optimal solution to facilitate a report;

assigning a potential ticket price to the appropriate travel carrier;

wherein said potential ticket price is computed considering the potential rebate due to a strong share shift of the current travel carrier;

assigning an actual base ticket price to the appropriate travel carrier for each cell where a goal programming algorithm is minimized;

adding previously excluded sectors with low spend to said optimal solution; and

preparing report.

3. The method of claim 2, further comprising the steps of:

facilitating a benchmark for the optimization;

wherein an optimal solution benchmark is created;

computing an air carrier flights distribution; and

estimating the percentage of segments excluded from optimization.