Loyalty points system and method with supplemental authorizations

Abstract

The invention facilitates pooling, gifting or transferring of geographic area loyalty points between accounts. The invention also facilitates a transfer of geographic area loyalty points from a consumer account associated with a sponsoring company to a consumer account associated with a host company. The invention may also facilitate gifting of loyalty points to charitable organizations on a recurring basis, wherein the gifting may transfer any portion of geographic based points to various charities. The system may also convert the geographic area loyalty points to a monetary value, thereby allowing the points to be donated to a charity such that the donation appears to be a monetary value donation to the charity.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application claims priority to, and is a continuation-in-part of, U.S. Ser. No. 10 / 378,456, filed Mar. 3, 2003 and entitled “System and Method for Real-Time Transfer of Loyalty Points Between Accounts.” The '456 application claims priority to, and is a continuation-in-part of, U.S. Ser. No. 10 / 027,984, filed Dec. 21, 2001 and entitled “System And Method For Networked Loyalty Program.” This application also claims priority to, and is a continuation-in-part of, U.S. Ser. No. 10 / 304,251 filed on Nov. 26, 2002 and entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR TRANSFER OF LOYALTY POINTS.” The '984 application and the '251 application claim priority to, and are continuations-in-part of, U.S. Ser. No. 09 / 836,213, filed Apr. 17, 2001 and entitled “System and Method for Networked Loyalty Program”, which itself claims priority to, and the benefit of, U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60 / 279,817, filed Mar. 29, 2001 and entitled “System and Method for Ne...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0008]The invention includes facilitating the substantially real-time pooling, gifting or transferring of geographic area loyalty points between accounts. The invention also facilitates a transfer of geographic area loyalty points from at least one consumer account associated with a sponsoring company to at least one consumer account associated with a host company. The invention may also facilitate gifting of loyalty points to charitable organizations on a recurring basis, wherein the gifting may transfer any portion of geographic based points to various charities. The charities may or may not be located in the same geographic area as where the loyalty points where earned. The system may also convert the geographic area loyalty points to a monetary value, thereby allowing the points to be donated to a charity such that the donation appears to be a monetary value donation to the charity.

Problems solved by technology

Loyalty programs have been relatively successful; however, numerous loyalty programs exist, so businesses have a difficult time differentiating their loyalty programs from other loyalty programs on the market.

However, because many loyalty point accounts are associated with a single consumer, existing loyalty systems do not allow a consumer to efficiently transfer loyalty points to another consumer loyalty point account.

Moreover, while some loyalty accounts may allow the consumer to use the loyalty points in a geographic area to purchase gifts for others, the loyalty points are not sufficiently transferable to another consumer such that the other consumer can purchase the same gift or aggregate points for a different gift.

However, it is often difficult for an individual sponsoring company to offer a sufficiently wide range of reward items in certain geographic areas to satisfy the varied interests of its consumers.

Moreover, many of the consumers may only engage in a limited amount of business in a certain geographic area with the particular sponsoring company and / or may only earn a limited amount of sponsored loyalty points from the sponsoring company within the geographic area.

As such, a consumer's loyalty point account with the sponsoring company may include a minimal amount of loyalty points in a geographic area and the minimal point balance may be insufficient to obtain any desired reward item in the geographic area.

Additionally, even if a consumer obtains a sufficient point balance in a geographic area with a particular sponsoring company, the consumer may not be interested in redeeming the points for any of the limited reward items in the geographic area offered by the company, the consumer may forget or ignore the existence of the point balance and / or the consumer may not desire to spend the time reviewing the reward items or completing the redemption information.

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