I guess, its usually ignored by the bash. Its there, where I too have observed similarly, specially while specifying paths (in Linux commands) when mis-typed to put multiple / (i.e. // or even /// )

My feeling has been that bash parses them to make only one '/' in the command parameters. There is no difference otherwise. It's just a feature in bash not available in other older shells like sh, where, I hope, you'd get an error for such mis-types.