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System Design questions require understanding of core concepts and practice. PracHub provides solutions with explanations to help you master system design interviews.

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This is a hard difficulty System Design question, commonly asked during Onsite rounds at Rippling.

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This question is commonly asked for Software Engineer candidates at Rippling during technical interviews.

Design a hotel search and booking system | Rippling Interview Question

Q: Design a hotel search and booking system

This question evaluates a candidate's ability in large-scale system design, covering distributed architecture, data modeling for hotels and availability, external API integration, concurrency control, and consistency management.

Assume you are asked to design a hotel search and booking service that runs inside a larger platform (similar to an online travel agency).

Requirements:

Hotel and room data are provided by external hotel systems via their APIs. Your system must import hotel and room information, and keep it reasonably up to date.
Users search for hotels near a location specified by latitude/longitude, along with check-in/check-out dates and number of guests.
The system must show available rooms and prices, and allow a user to place a booking.
The true source of availability is the external hotel systems. Those systems are also accepting bookings from other channels at the same time, so room availability can change at any moment.

Design the system and focus on:

The high-level architecture, including services that handle import/sync, search, and booking, and how they interact with external hotel APIs.
The database schema for hotels, rooms, availability/pricing, and bookings.
The end-to-end flows for: (a) importing hotel/room data, (b) searching for hotels, and (c) creating a booking and receiving confirmation.
How your design maintains consistency of room availability with the external hotel systems, and how it handles concurrency (e.g., multiple users or servers trying to book the last room) and external API failures.

Assume you are asked to design a hotel search and booking service that runs inside a larger platform (similar to an online travel agency).

Requirements:

Hotel and room data are provided by external hotel systems via their APIs. Your system must import hotel and room information, and keep it reasonably up to date.
Users search for hotels near a location specified by latitude/longitude, along with check-in/check-out dates and number of guests.
The system must show available rooms and prices, and allow a user to place a booking.
The true source of availability is the external hotel systems. Those systems are also accepting bookings from other channels at the same time, so room availability can change at any moment.

Design the system and focus on:

The high-level architecture, including services that handle import/sync, search, and booking, and how they interact with external hotel APIs.
The database schema for hotels, rooms, availability/pricing, and bookings.
The end-to-end flows for: (a) importing hotel/room data, (b) searching for hotels, and (c) creating a booking and receiving confirmation.
How your design maintains consistency of room availability with the external hotel systems, and how it handles concurrency (e.g., multiple users or servers trying to book the last room) and external API failures.

Design a hotel search and booking system

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Design a hotel search and booking system

Quick Overview

Solution

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