I was with you on this application for a while but then I thought back to my own experiences a long time ago supporting hotel booking systems. Regular ecommerce is a walk in the park compared to the complexity of a hotel booking system, even for a single hotel that has a modest quantity of rooms.

In broad brush strokes for someone wanting to skim money off people booking hotel rooms by selling rooms cheap (e.g. lastminute.com) the holy blockchain does indeed sound like the answer to all their prayers but it does not do anything to solve the hard problems that cannot be simplified even with a simple country hotel.

Only if you have been at the sharp end of fixing hotel booking systems do you appreciate some of the finer points. You really cannot double book rooms and yet every day that simple country guest house might have someone on the phone wanting the same room at the same time that there is someone at the front desk and someone trying to book through lastminute.com. Locking that record is a time critical thing even if the hotel is out in the countryside where nothing ever happens and time moves slowly. That room could also have bookings on it from people that got married there five years previously and are on the way back for their anniversary, therefore there could be a substantial amount of data tied into that slot. Furthermore, that room could be booked but if the guest does not show up before a given time then it is up for sale again. So that availability presented as yes/no on the website is not as simple as a yes/no, there are other provisional states depending on what has been paid and who has showed up. There might not even be the option to bump those guests into a more deluxe room if those more deluxe rooms have someone walk through the door and take them.

Ian Dury and the Blockheads probably have better insight and knowledge than a venture capitalist and the blockchains have about how to improve upon the current state of the art when it comes to hotel inventory management. Rome was not built in a day and neither were the booking systems needed to cater for visitors to Rome. It is just not that simple. Fast broadband cannot be relied upon for a lot of hotels, so the idea of updating a blockchain and sending it out to every Tom Dick and Harry chancer on the internet hoping to sell 'cheap rate' rooms with them all being instantly updated is not the hospitality system I would want to be doing support for.

If the de-facto was 'decentralized' and I worked in hospitality systems support and a new 'centralized' idea came along I would be straight on that bandwagon and you would not be able to stop me!

Maybe it just depends on what end of the telescope you are on. My perspective is the business end, with the dawn starts, skipped break times and extra hours put well into the small hours, fixing real problems for real people with real expectations of service.

The people I see in the blockchain space do not have any knowledge of the problem space that their change the world solutions purportedly seek to address, as mentioned I was with you at the start of what you had to say here, but, on second thoughts I don't think that blockchain is a magic bullet even for the simple task of getting a room booked in the smallest of hotels. Furthermore, the task isn't just getting a room booked as a yes/no thing, there is this bigger problem of hotel booking management and centralised systems, well trained staff, hard working staff and technical support is the glue that makes it all work as an apparently 'yes/no' thing. At best blockchain is woefully naive and, from a support perspective, a disaster if ever implemented in this seemingly simple 'use case'.