Easy in the technical sense, certainly. The issue moves to UX. Likely there's some metrics/calculus that suggest that eating the occasional customer caused loss

Easy in the technical sense, certainly. The issue moves to UX. Likely there's some metrics/calculus that suggest that eating the occasional customer caused loss is actually more beneficial to the bottom line than having the customer eat it. I'd expect that having customers swallow the cost of late cancelations would likely alienate a large fraction of them; perhaps the calculus is such that the money saved doing this is actually less than the lifetime value of the average customer. I've seen this said this a few times here in various ways, but the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero [0]. While it's feasible to eliminate most/all fraud in various arenas, it's not cost effective to do so. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913