Design a booking system

Q: Design a booking system

This question evaluates system design skills including distributed systems, data modeling, concurrency control, consistency models, API design, scalability, low-latency querying, and reliability for transactional booking flows.

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Question

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Design an online booking system (e.g., for hotel rooms, meeting rooms, or appointment slots).

Requirements

Cover the following in your design:

Core flows : search availability, create booking (reserve), confirm, cancel, modify.
Correctness : prevent double-booking under high concurrency.
Scale : support many users and a large inventory (properties/rooms/slots).
Latency : fast availability queries.
Reliability : handle retries, partial failures, idempotency.

Clarifications to address

What consistency guarantees are needed for availability and booking creation?
Do you need a “hold” (temporary reservation) with expiration?
How do you model inventory (per day, per time slot, per resource)?

Provide APIs, data model, and a high-level architecture, and discuss tradeoffs.

Design a booking system

Quick Overview

Requirements

Clarifications to address

Solution

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