Appeal No. 2005-0823
Application No. 10/300,895 Page 25
We additionally find from the disclosures of IATA and Cogswell
taken with the disclosure of Brice, that from the knowledge by
artisans of daily reporting, that an artisan would have been
taught to enhance IAR by moving to daily reporting, and reporting
the following day.
From the background of the invention found in appellant's
specification, we make the following findings of what was known
in the prior art. Our findings of fact are as follows:
“There are two different types of airline tickets
issued in the airline industry: fully refundable tickets
and non-refundable tickets. Travel agencies, on behalf
of their clients, may refund fully-refundable tickets
without any airline fee imposed. This is not the case
for non-refundable tickets, however. Instead, the same
passenger can use non-refundable tickets for future
travel on the same airline, but airlines currently
charge a change fee of about $100 to change such
tickets.
Travel agencies issue airlines tickets and report
sales of tickets and remit payments on a weekly
reporting cycle (e.g., Mon-Sun) to the Airline
Reporting Corporation (“ARC”), a company that is
wholly-owned by the member airlines.”
Because the travel agent does not release the
report until the end of the sales week, however, a
travel agent may void a ticket sale at no airline-fee
cost to the passenger because the ARC or airlines will
not know the ticket ever issued.
Travel agents may void tickets at the customer’s
request prior to the end of the current reporting
period (i.e., one week).
Figure 1 illustrates a conventional process of issuing
a ticketing transaction involving a client wishing to
change or cancel travel on a nonrefundable issued
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