SO CHECK IT

Like all the stupid shenanigans they do to overbook etc. banking on the fact that enough poor sops are gonna be out $500 because they broke their arm or something.

Here's the business model: You have a price that you anchor people with, and then you have overages that aren't a part of that anchor. This allows you to obfuscate the true cost of your product, and it pisses people off, but they generally don't draw a direct comparison between "you asshole" and "you don't have to do this."

There is a cost of business to cancellations - for example, I have a doctor whose appointments are six months out, despite the fact that she's been closed to new patients for a year. If you miss one of her appointments, she freaks out not because she's losing money, but because there are little babies she could be helping and now she can't. Thus we have a 24-hour cancellation policy not because we want to hit you with gotcha hidden fees, but because if you let us know more than 24 hours out we can probably find someone to take your slot.

Notably, Medicaid does not allow us to charge cancellation fees. If you're on Medicaid and you can't make your appointment, you can blow us the fuck off because Medicaid, believe it or not, recognizes that shitty fees from nowhere primarily hurt the indigent. Are designed to hurt the indigent. We have no better method to control our appointment schedule than cancellation fees, and the government has decided that our lack of better method is our problem, not poor people's, which, I mean frankly is a sound argument in my point of view.

I've found that if you book directly with the hotel, the hotel also has a 24-hour cancellation fee. It may go away if things are on promo, if they were a block buy, if they were mediated by a third party (priceline etc) or whatever because the hotel made less money on that reservation (and the third party made more). Airlines are the same way - if you buy a full rack rate no specials no manipulations fully refundable ticket directly from the airline, cancellations are a non-issue. The ticket costs three times as much, of course, because the airline is basically arbitraging the scheduling bullshit in order to get a different kind of profit or a different stream of revenue or whatever.

Which leads directly to:

Also, why would this need to be on the Blockchain? Since the property itself is centralized it seems like they could do it with one database somewhere instead of with all the cost & gas fees.

I mean, they could. If it's all on their database they can do whatever they want. Assuming their competitors do the same, and everyone takes one for the team and lowers their profits and their shareholders slap themselves on the back for their brilliant senses of justice.

Here's the CEO of Walmart begging congress to raise the minimum wage. Why? They're fucking Walmart!

The reason, thanks Milton Friedman, is that if Walmart raises its wages and Target doesn't, Target's stock goes up and Walmart's stock goes down. Target is serving its shareholders and Walmart is robbing them. Walmart's market cap goes down, Walmart's ability to finance goes down, walmart's ability to conduct business goes down, and walmart loses market dominance because in the race-to-the-bottom deathmatch called shareholder capitalism, walmart has proven itself unfit. And I mean, c'mon. Here's Doug McMillon up on front of congress whining about "people" while Jeff Bezos makes his drivers piss in bottles, at least until he can replace them with robots. Talk about killer instinct! Who's gonna make you more money, bitch?

LET'S PUT A BLOCKCHAIN ON IT

Now that shit is public. Now that shit is inviolable. Now that shit is accessible to anyone and everyone, auditable by anyone and everyone, and nobody controls the data. It's curated and maintained, yeah, but by making "1 night stay at the Holiday Inn Express in West Poughkeepsie on June 3rd 2023" a tokenized asset available for exchange by anyone (within the terms of service of Holiday Inn Express), all the priceline gerrymandering nonsense goes away. If I can exchange HIE stays but I can't exchange Ramada stays, HIE stays will command a premium over Ramada. Bargain shoppers will go Ramada, last-minute travelers will go HIE. Large corporate offices will likely maintain a pool of available reservations that they swap in and out; you could buy options on hotel stays, for example, for the conference you want to get to but aren't sure it works with your schedule. An entire secondary market can develop where stays and travelers can be intermediated for free - that "for free" part is important because they won't be for free, they'll be for a hair over free and aggregators will compete on service and price, just like they should.

If you look at it, it's fucking ridiculous that in the year of our lord 2009 a criminal sociopath in need of money laundering said "I'm going to out-computer the government" and proceeded to create a system in which every transaction is forever visible to nine decimal places but here we are. At a fundamental level, the difference between "little money" and "big money" is the inefficiencies of the system work for "big money" and against "little money" and when you replace the system with one that's breathtakingly transparent...

...things can't help but get fairer.