> I'm hoping that behind the scenes they really are looking at a better plan than just "work around it",
Airline-IT is mostly just a big pile of workarounds to cope with limitations from 40+ year old systems. I've worked with reservation systems and seen their modernizations through the years. Modern xml-formats shoving megabytes of data for every reservation. They are very wasteful, generously designed with redundant fields, long feature-lists and all kind of annoying shit. But at the end, your whole booking can still drip on the passenger's name being one character too long. Even after decades and multiple iterations of interfaces, at the core the systems today still depend on whatever someone in the 1960s considered as good enough for the US-market.
Airline-IT is mostly just a big pile of workarounds to cope with limitations from 40+ year old systems. I've worked with reservation systems and seen their modernizations through the years. Modern xml-formats shoving megabytes of data for every reservation. They are very wasteful, generously designed with redundant fields, long feature-lists and all kind of annoying shit. But at the end, your whole booking can still drip on the passenger's name being one character too long. Even after decades and multiple iterations of interfaces, at the core the systems today still depend on whatever someone in the 1960s considered as good enough for the US-market.