Patent 7562027 was granted and assigned to ITA Software on July, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A travel planning system that implements seat availability determinations is described. The planning system includes a scheduling process for determining a set of instances of transportation that satisfy a user query and a faring process that determines fares valid for at least some of the instances in the set of instances of transportation. The travel planning system also includes an availability process that uses results from a single source of seat availability for a mode of transportation to determine a set of available instances of transportation and determines whether the results from the single source are reliable.