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I believe it was sarcasm; of course they’ll continue collecting money and not paying people during maintenance, because who doesn’t want more money?

It was sarcasm but I still would hazard a guess that the public facing payments are harder than the backend payment runs.

A few thoughts as a non expert:

They might take thousands of bookings for a single hotel, so the volume of inbound payments is significantly more.

Public facing payments have to operate 24/7.

They have to deal with fraud and bad actors.

Transactions need to be real time rather than batch.

They need to support all kinds of international payments.

They have to take payments over web, mobile and call centres.

They have to support PCI and GDPR compliance on the customer side.

I’m sure neither side is easy at their scale, but B2C sounds much trickier to me even though there are opportunities to outsource on both sides.