Ask HN: Do online booking companies have no flexibility in customer service?

I was hoping to get some feedback from founders or regular users of online booking sites. I have been using the same site, Lastminute.com for several years. As a consultant who works mostly overseas I spend several thousand euros a year with them. On my latest booking I mistyped the email address. Got no notification and no record of a booking in my account. So the next day I searched and booked again, thinking the payment had not gone through. With autofill, used the same wrong email address. So totally my error, and by the terms of their booking, both are non-refundable. It's still two months before the trip, so it's not like the inventory can't be resold. But policy is policy, no exceptions. So my question is, surely there is some flexibility to help out what I would have thought would be a valuable customer. Those of you who have developed similar sites, is it really too expensive to have room for some human decision making in customer service?