Patent ID: 7010494

Claim:
A method for a computing system of an organization to provide information about airline tickets to customers by using predictive pricing that is based on historical airline ticket prices, the method comprising: in the computing system, retrieving information about prices for airlines tickets that were previously offered to customers for multiple airline flights, each of the previously offered airline ticket prices specified by an airline ticket provider unrelated to the organization; in the computing system, for each of the multiple airline flights, automatically determining pricing factors for the airline flight that are used to determine prices for the airline flight by the unrelated airline ticket provider for the airline flight, by identifying from the retrieved airline ticket price information multiple previously offered prices for airline tickets for the airline flight; and analyzing the identified previously offered airline ticket prices to detect the pricing factors for the airline flight, the pricing factors corresponding to changes in the identified previously offered airline ticket prices; and in the computing system, after the automatic determining of the pricing factors for the airline flights, and for each of multiple requests that are each from a customer for information about airline flights, automatically advising the customer, by identifying one or more of the multiple airline flights that each satisfy criteria in the request from the customer; retrieving information about current prices offered for the identified airline flights that are specified by the unrelated airline ticket providers for the airline flights; predicting future prices that will be offered for the identified airline flights by the unrelated airline ticket providers for those flights, the predicting based at least in part on the determined pricing factors for those airline flights; for each of the identified airline flights, predicting a time at which an airline ticket for the identified airline flight will be available for a lowest price, based at least in part on the predicted future offered prices and the current offered prices; and using the predicted times to advise the customer related to a current purchase of one or more airline tickets.