A Novel Cancellation Protection Service in Online Reservation System

Web-based systems are frequently used by the customers as well as travel agencies for online flight reservation and booking. In general, customers prefer to plan their trips as early as possible to take advantage of affordable booking opportunities as the price of flight tickets increases over time. However, changing the flight plan may lead to high penalties for the customers which may turn their profits into a loss in promotion tickets. Motivated by this, in this research work, quality of experience (QoE)-based approach is proposed to support user satisfaction in the aforementioned scenario. A cancellation protection service (CPS) is developed to provide assurance for early booking while establishing a balance between user satisfaction and the profit of the service provider (SP). Furthermore, three different CPS functions, namely Fixed CPS, QoE-based CPS, and Flexible CPS are modeled. In our proposed QoE-based CPS method, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is adopted to assign appropriate weights to different criteria. The proposed CPS approach can enable the customers to have a refund under certain terms if they decide to cancel their tickets. The proposed method is analyzed with real-world data from an airline reservation system which shows the customer transactions in a 6 months-period. The results indicate the effects of the fixed CPS, flexible CPS, and QoE-based CPS methods in the SP's profit points of view. Last but not least, the proposed QoE-based CPS method provides a balance between both the SP profit and user satisfaction.