> but there's also the possibility of concurrent access, and someone else booked while you were thinking You can restart the flow from scratch, and you'll stil

> but there's also the possibility of concurrent access, and someone else booked while you were thinking You can restart the flow from scratch, and you'll still get "n seats available at this price", which rules out that it was booked while I was looking. > so they cache a lot of things and only get realtime inventory when you're very close to booking; then they often do a very poor job of cache invalidation (because it's hard) Yet the end result is the same: the consumer gets a bait and switch. You're not wrong here, but what you point to is the problem: companies using "blame computers" as a way to abdicate responsibility for the problem. > There's a lot of ways you could organize the data so it's less terrible, but all of those involve a lot more IT involvement than airlines want to invest it. Precisely. One can look at it too as there is no penalty these days for screwing consumers over, so there's no economic impetus to do anything about it when it happens.