If my experience with multiple different "oh, sorry, no flight tonight" is anything to go by the ground staff are always completely unprepared for the process o

If my experience with multiple different "oh, sorry, no flight tonight" is anything to go by the ground staff are always completely unprepared for the process of putting people into a hotel. It's as if nothing like this has happened before in the entire history of the airline. You'll have a massive queue with some harried staff member hastily scanning the 3-ring binder seemingly trying to reinvent the process from first principles. The whole process seems to kick off when the first passenger hits the counter, too - not, say, when the airline first knows that this situation is inevitable. I think they are always hoping for a miraculous save ("It turns out half the passengers have old friends in the city they want to overnight with, and the other half got on to other flights with 10 minutes notice, hooray!").