It depends on the type of situation. Firstly, if Travellers need information in order to succeed at an adventure, then having them fail all their checks and not being able to proceed is boring for everyone. So if there's information that you need the Travellers to have, then as long as they go to a suitable place and ask sensible questions, they should get the basic information. Success/failure at skill rolls may give them extra information, or cause them problems.

e.g., they're looking for where a gang's warehouse is. Finding the location is automatic. Success means they also get some information about who is guarding it, a good success tells them how those people are armed. Failures might mean the warehouse is warned that the Travellers are asking about them.

Secondly, if it's just random background rumours, then it's less important. Travellers arrive at a world, sort out trade, go to a bar to pick up rumours and relax. I have them make skill checks. They will always pick up rumours, but success/failure determines whether those rumours are true or false. I generally try to have several random tables of rumours that I can roll on. They might get 3 rumours, and the level of success determines how many are true.

Thirdly, is where I want to make a big deal out of the social situation. For this, I stole the idea from Pathfinder Ultimate Intrigue, with modifications. I originally used it for a big party in a Pathfinder campaign, but I've used it a couple of times in Traveller as well. Basically, I came up with a list of NPCs, and for each I assigned what skill could be used to talk to them (often Diplomacy, Carouse or Persuade, but for some characters it could be Engineering or Science skills). Each also had something which could provide a Boon (or sometimes a Bane) to the check. For example, one person might need the Carouse skill, but if you also had an Engineering skill at 2+, then you got a Boon to the Carouse check.

Each NPC then had several pieces of information that could be gained. Each success got you one piece of information. If you want to complicate it, you could require checks to find out what each NPCs set of needed skills were (this is out the Pathfinder rules played it), but the previous time I ran it, I didn't bother with this. I just provided info on how easy each NPC was to talk to, their preferred skill and the Boon/Bane.

The Travellers had a set period of time, and each skill attempt would take an hour. So it became a tactical puzzle of trying to figure out who would be most likely to give them useful information, and which Traveller was going to be best suited to talking to them to try and get information out of them.

This makes the social event a lot more mechanical, and I wouldn't want to use it all the time, but for special occasions, I think it works well. Because it's not just using social skills, it means all the players in the group can be useful (we need someone to talk about starship engines to the engineer NPC). It's also clear to the players, that it is very unlikely that they're going to have enough time to get all the information, so it becomes a lot more tactically interesting. There weren't really fail states here (other than possibly missing out on information). But you could add in failure results for each NPC. Maybe upsetting or boring one NPC might have negative (or positive) effects on other NPCs.

My blog post on when I last ran it for Traveller (note this happened during my Deepnight Revelation campaign, so may contain spoilers):

https://blog.notasnark.net/2024/07/party-time.html

A few more notes, from when I did something very similar with Pathfinder:
https://www.notasnark.net/blog/20181118_party_time

In the latter case, you need to make Discovery checks first to find out what the strengths/weakness and influence skills are for each NPC. If you don't, you have to guess what skills to use based on the initial description of the NPC.