Sorry, Our Booking System Is Permanently Broken

I know I may sound like a broken record, but this situation continues to amaze me. How the airline booking systems are broken. After 30 years of the internet and - I believe - more than 20 years of online presence during the period of the most rapid technology development.

And the crown example here is not an obscure third world carrier - it is the flagship, one of the top carriers in the world. Lufthansa. And it is not just me. I'm not doing any evil here. A friend of mine who is much more knowledgeable in web technologies was having very similar experience. And when he opened a debug pane in his browser all he saw was a litany of "500" - server errors. A 500 error typically means something has been seriously wron on the server side. Either a crashed session, a disconnected database, or exhaustion of server resources (typically an out of memory error).

So these are not just simple bugs which can be quickly fixed. They are severe architectural problems at the heart of the online reservation system. And they have been there for years, although definitely in 2023 the situation has gotten much worse.

And I'm not trying anything fancy here either - the example screenshots are what I got when trying to book a 2-leg Lufthansa-operated flight from Seattle to Krakow. It threw at me a bunch of weird front-end messages (no flight in your booking, selection has been lost) and finally proposed that I try again.

Interestingly the first set of messages resulted in the booking actually was made (a confirmation email arrived in my inbox) and the second resulted in my credit card charge. So clearly something seriously out of sync.

The scary part is this situation has continued for many months now, and to me it is incomprehensible how an organization which generates majority of its revenue via the online booking system can let this last. Or perhaps the underlying software code has grown beyond the capacity of the developers and is in a state that nobody is capable to fix it?