Patent ID: 7016859

Claim:
A method of managing purchasing contracts between supplier entities for a common carrier and customer entities for the purchase of ticket products, said method comprising the steps of: generating a ticket purchasing contract between a supplier entity and a customer entity, the purchasing contract being applicable to a plurality of contracted purchasing transactions that effect the purchase, by the customer entity, of a ticket on the common carrier for travel (ticketing transactions), the transaction being effected, at least partially, through a computerized system, said generating step including defining a plurality of contract terms for the purchasing contract, each contract term being defined by a plurality of term attributes, wherein a contract term defines a purchasing obligation of the customer entity, storing a term data set of the term attributes (term attributes data set) associated with each contract term in a computer database, collecting historical transaction data sets representing ticketing transactions by the customer entity; identifying a proposed contract term having a set of term attributes; identifying historical ticketing transaction data sets applicable to the proposed contract term by comparing contract term attributes with at least a portion of each historical ticketing transaction data set; qualifying a contract term by, forecasting the performance of the proposed contract term using, as input, at least a portion of each identified historical ticketing transaction data set, and qualifying the proposed contract term based, at least partly, on the forecasted performance; assigning the contract term to a proposed contract; and evaluating the proposed contract with a plurality of qualified contract terms; collecting sets of ticketing transaction data for a plurality of historical ticketing transactions; storing the ticketing transaction data in at least one computer database; identifying, among the population of stored ticketing transaction data sets, a plurality of the stored sets of transaction ticketing data as relating to a ticketing transaction under the purchasing contract (contract transaction data sets), by comparing the stored ticketing transaction data with term attributes of a contract term including executing a computer program to identify historical ticketing transactions as a contract transaction by comparing transaction data sets with the term attributes data set for a contract term, whereby the historical ticketing transaction is identified as a contract transaction when the transaction data set is identified with the term attributes of the contract term; and generating a collection of contract transaction data sets by associating the transaction data set of each identified contract transaction with each term data set of a contract term with which the transaction is identified.