Online travel reservation system and method delivering restriction-aware travel opportunities

摘要

An online reservation system including a fare search engine is described. Thesystem comprises a database of published fares, a database of rules attachedto the published fares and a fare family solver to categorize the published faresinto sets of predefined generic fare families on the basis of the rules attachedto the published fares. The fare family solver further comprises a generic partitioningfare family database holding the attributes of each predefined generic farefamily allowing to determine to which fare family the published fares belongto. The attributes of each predefined generic fare family are first set up by afare family composer operated by an administrator of the system. The online reservationsystem of the inventionallows returning to the end-users of online travel serviceproviders travel solutions categorized in families of fares having variousranges of prices and levels of restrictions attached to.