Design trip booking REST API and schema
Company: Turo
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Design a RESTful API for a guest to book a trip.
Include:
- Core endpoints (search availability, create booking, view/cancel booking, payment/confirmation if needed)
- Request/response shapes and key status codes
- Data model design and indexing
- Two inventory modeling approaches:
1) "Per-date inventory" (store availability per day)
2) "Range/interval-based inventory" (store availability as date ranges)
Compare pros/cons.
Follow-up: Add support for extending an existing order/booking (e.g., extending checkout date). What changes are needed in the API and the data model?
Quick Answer: This question evaluates RESTful API design, temporal data modeling, inventory management strategies, request/response/status-code design, data schema and indexing, and handling booking lifecycle changes such as extensions.