Patent ID: 8315892

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of assigning hotel rooms to a group of customers, the method comprising: receiving at a reservation system a customer request; identifying in response to the customer request a group of customers requesting from the reservation system a joint booking; selecting a predetermined customer from the group in respect of a specific value related to a previous generated revenue by the predetermined customer; retrieving from a first database a set of business rules associated with the provision of the place to each customer of the group beginning with the predetermined customer; retrieving from a second database a set of available hotel rooms, each of available hotel rooms having one or more attributes; retrieving from a third database one or more customer preferences in respect of the one or more attributes; assigning a priority order to the business rules and applying the business rules in accordance with the priority associated with a specific assignment of hotel rooms; applying the business rules to the customer preferences to create a set of allowed combinations of hotel room and customer for each customer of the group; determining by a computer system from the retrieved set of available hotel rooms and retrieved customer preferences a first score in relation to the set of allowed combinations of hotel rooms and customer for each customer of the group; determining a second score in relation to the degree of proximity between each available hotel room and a predetermined hotel room of a predetermined customer of the group of customers; updating the first score to include the second score in relation to the degree of proximity to produce updated scoring pertaining to allowed combinations of hotel room and customer; selecting the highest scoring allowed combination from the set of allowed combinations of hotel room and customer; and assigning the hotel rooms to the customers based on the highest scoring allowed combination for each customer in the group to ensure each customer is in proximity to others in the group.