If I had to make a wild guess, on top of a lot of ways of handling this technically, there's probably a set of business-policies they follow in the event of som

If I had to make a wild guess, on top of a lot of ways of handling this technically, there's probably a set of business-policies they follow in the event of some problem like a room being double-booked, or a lodging otherwise becoming unavailable after the reservation is made. > In the (hopefully rare) event of a problem, they probably try and keep people happy through a standard playbook of things like refunds, giving future coupons or discounts, and trying and arranging alternative lodging. > Even if their databases could somehow guarantee to be perfectly consistent and no random booking problems occur, they still need those standard policies in place to deal with random hotel problems like flooding or other problems.