Patent ID: 7392228

Claim:
A method of optimizing the process of quoting prices for reserving a date-constrained service comprising the steps: defining a family of candidate pricing policies wherein each of said pricing policies are comprised of: a rule for determining the quoted price based on parameters of a quote request as well as data parameters describing at least one or more of the following: inventory levels, time remaining until service commencement, historic pattern of bookings, reservations or sales, competitor price, period of service; generating an application schedule, wherein said application schedule comprises: a plurality of pairs of data, wherein the first element of each said pair represents a unique quote circumstance; the second element of each said pair represents a specific member of said family of candidate pricing policies and wherein said plurality of pairs represents a logical mapping from a unique quote circumstance to a specific member of said family of candidate pricing policies; responding to a quote request by, searching said application schedule for the unique data pair that corresponds to the parameters of said quote request and identifying the secondary element of said unique data pair as the applicable pricing policy that will be applied in response to said quote request; applying said applicable pricing policy to the parameters of said quote request and said data parameters; determining and quoting a price value in final response to said quote request; computing a performance metric associated with any sale resulting from said quoting process; summing said performance metric over all sales transactions associated with each member of said family of candidate policies; comparing said summed performance metric of each member of said family of candidate policies and eliminating at least one sub-optimal members of said family of candidate pricing policies based on the value of its associated performance metric; whereby the sub-optimal member of said family of pricing policies are thus identified and removed from said family of pricing policies and an improved optimal family of policies is thus determined.