I have a good one. TLDR; Payment system was pointing to stage while booking system had prod configs, causing real flights to be booked at no charge
To set some context for those of you not familiar with online travel booking systems:
The large players get flight / hotel inventory from a global service
They display that information neatly for everyone on their apps / websites
They collect passenger information & payments from users
Then proceed to book a slot of the global inventory and eventually settle payments with the carrier at a later date
While building the mobile app for one such platform, we frequently got the display information data from the production database because mocking realtime scenarios was a huge challenge in staging. We then proceeded to make payments & bookings via the staging services so that no payment was actually necessary and no bookings went through (What could go wrong?).
One day while updating the booking service, someone accidentally deployed the production booking configs to stage. Now a very timely email was sent (because email is obviously the most reliable form of communication) out urging everyone not to place bookings on stage. A very timely email that was missed unfortunately which led to us placing a few dozen bookings in stage which didn't need payments but did very much get sent to the airline carriers.
The funny part: Because these were test bookings the PAX names were of the form
Mr. {insert random string of letters}
Mr. {insert profanity}
Mr. {insert "testing" | "test"}
Now imagine the people at the airport on the days of these flights wondering who these people are and why they haven't shown up for their flights :D
Hahaha!
I can only imagine the plight of the flight crew who don't know if they have to be politically correct or just laugh out loud at the prank that someone is playing on them by writing absurd names on the flight ticket.
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I have a good one. TLDR; Payment system was pointing to stage while booking system had prod configs, causing real flights to be booked at no charge
To set some context for those of you not familiar with online travel booking systems:
While building the mobile app for one such platform, we frequently got the display information data from the production database because mocking realtime scenarios was a huge challenge in staging. We then proceeded to make payments & bookings via the staging services so that no payment was actually necessary and no bookings went through (What could go wrong?).
One day while updating the booking service, someone accidentally deployed the production booking configs to stage. Now a very timely email was sent (because email is obviously the most reliable form of communication) out urging everyone not to place bookings on stage. A very timely email that was missed unfortunately which led to us placing a few dozen bookings in stage which didn't need payments but did very much get sent to the airline carriers.
The funny part: Because these were test bookings the PAX names were of the form
Mr. {insert random string of letters}
Mr. {insert profanity}
Mr. {insert "testing" | "test"}
Now imagine the people at the airport on the days of these flights wondering who these people are and why they haven't shown up for their flights :D
Hahaha!
I can only imagine the plight of the flight crew who don't know if they have to be politically correct or just laugh out loud at the prank that someone is playing on them by writing absurd names on the flight ticket.