Abstract
Current online ticket booking systems either do not allow customers to reserve a ticket with a locked price, or grant a fixed reservation timespan, typically 24 hours. The former often leads to false availability: when a customer decides to purchase a ticket after a few queries, she finds that either the ticket is no longer available or the price has hiked up. The latter, on the other hand, may result in unnecessary holdback: a customer cannot purchase a ticket because someone else is holding it, who then cancels the reservation after an excessively long period of time. False availability and holdback routinely lead to loss of revenues, credibility and above all, customers. To rectify these problems, this paper introduces a transaction model for e-ticket systems to support a reservation functionality: customers can reserve tickets with a locked price, for a timespan that is determined by the demands on the tickets, rather than being fixed for all kinds of the tickets. We propose a method for implementing the model, based on hypothetical queries and triggers. We also show how to adjust the reservation timespan w.r.t. demands. We experimentally verify that our model and methods effectively reduce both false availability and holdback rates. These yield a practical approach to improving not only e-ticket systems but also other e-commerce systems.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Mitchell, C., Newton, J., Willdorf, N., Bennett, A., Stellin, S.: A to z guide to travel secrets you need to know (2007), http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/a-to-z-guide-to-travel-secrets-you-need-to-know
Expedia.com, http://www.expedia.com
Orbitz, http://www.orbitz.com/
Priceline.com, http://tickets.priceline.com
Bonner, A.J.: Hypothetical datalog complexity and expressibility. Theoretical Computer Science 76, 3–51 (1990)
Griffin, T., Hull, R.: A framework for implementing hypothetical queries. In: SIGMOD (1997)
Sistla, A.P., Wolfson, O.: Triggers on database histories. IEEE Quarterly Bulletin on Data Engineering, Special Issue on Active Databases 15, 48–51 (1992)
Ramakrishnan, R., Gehrke, J.: Database Management Systems, McGraw-Hill Higher Education. McGraw-Hill, New York (2000)
Berardi, D., Calvanese, D., Giacomo, G.D., Hull, R., Mecella, M.: Automatic composition of transition-based semantic web services with messaging. In: VLDB, Trondheim, Norway (2005)
Berardi, D., Giacomo, G.D., Lenzerini, M., Mecella, M., Calvanese, D.: Synthesis of underspecified composite e-services based on automated reasoning. In: ICSOC (2004)
Willig, A.: A short introduction to queueing theory, http://www.tkn.tu-berlin.de/curricula/ws0203/ue-kn/qt.pdf
Haas, H.: Web service use case: Travel reservation. W3C (2002)
Pistore, M., Roberti, P., Traverso, P.: Process-level composition of executable web services: “on-the-fly” versus “once-for-all” composition. In: Gómez-Pérez, A., Euzenat, J. (eds.) ESWC 2005. LNCS, vol. 3532, Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Zaremba, M., Moran, M., Haselwanter, T.: Applying semantic web services to virtual travel agency case study. In: Sure, Y., Domingue, J. (eds.) ESWC 2006. LNCS, vol. 4011, Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Malizia, A.: Adding flexibility to b2c booking systems using a virtual intermediate travel agent. In: HVL/HCC (2005)
Leder, K.Z., Spagniole, S.E., Wild, S.M.: Probabilistically optimized airline overbooking strategies, or “anyone willing to take a later flight?!”. The UMAP Journal (2002)
Klophaus, R., Pölt, S.: Airline overbooking with dynamic spoilage costs. Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management (2007)
Lawrence, R.D., Hong, S.J., Cherrier, J.: Passenger-based predictive modeling of airline no-show rates. In: KDD 2003. Proceedings of the ninth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, ACM Press, New York (2003)
Balmin, A., Papadimitriou, T., Papakonstantinou, Y.: Hypothetical queries in an olap environment. In: VLDB (2000)
Fan, W., Cong, G., Bohannon, P.: Querying XML with update syntax. In: SIGMOD (2007)
Gabbay, D.M., Giordano, L., Martelli, A., Olivetti, N.: A language for handling hypothetical updates and inconsistency. Journal of IGPL 4, 385–416 (1996)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zhang, Y., Fan, W., Chen, H., Sheng, H., Wu, Z. (2007). Extending Online Travel Agency with Adaptive Reservations. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2007: CoopIS, DOA, ODBASE, GADA, and IS. OTM 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4803. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76848-7_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76848-7_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-76846-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-76848-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)