I worked on some of these systems as well. Credit card details haven't been sent by emails for many many years, and I believe the last fax Booking ever sent was somewhere in 2018 or 2019, the whole fax system was decommissioned. By the time I left I believe they were still showing CC details to hotels via the extranet or an app though. A virtual CC thingy exists, but like someone said upthread, hotels are very set in their ways and often behind the times.

Oh hilarious! The business logic for getting optimal routing for faxes was... quirky. Picking the right source country/line/carrier to get the best quality line while getting the lowest cost and balancing capacity. In the old days all held in a complex queue in a MySQL db (sigh). I recall getting paged out of bed a number of times as an escalation to get it all working again after we hit yet another lock contention issue in MySQL.

Good times!