Booking System Website

Websites for companies like airlines, hotels, and theatres require developers to think about scenarios not present in most websites. In a movie theater for example, let's assume two customers are shopping for a seat in a full theater that has only one seat remaining. When both users come to the website, it will show both users one seat is available so they will both proceed to purchase the last ticket.

The big question is who actually gets the ticket? In advanced programming, this is called a race condition. Let's assume they both pay at approximately the same time. Unlike other websites where you can just process both of them and tell the person that lost the race sorry. It doesn't quite work for airlines, hotels, and movie theaters since a human could not possibly fairly award the winner, not to mention processing of refunds and huge disappointment from your customer of something that may be considered necessary.

If the computer makes a choice, then that is optimal and the loser will feel sad and so forth and make other plans. However, if they are both declared the winner and a human must sort it out, then that could give your company all types of headaches and possibly legal trouble.