Design an in-memory hotel booking system

Q: Design an in-memory hotel booking system

This is a System Design interview question from Imc for Software Engineer roles. View the full question and solution on PracHub.

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Question

Design a hotel booking system that supports reservations without using any database. You may only use in-memory data structures.

Requirements

Define APIs/data structures to support at least:

Add hotels, room types, and room inventory (or individual rooms)
Search availability for a date range (check-in, check-out)
Create a booking (reserve room(s))
Cancel a booking
Prevent double-booking under concurrent requests

Constraints/notes

All state is in memory (assume a single process unless you choose to extend to multiple nodes).
Clarify assumptions (e.g., time zones, check-out exclusivity, maximum date horizon).
Discuss complexity trade-offs and how you would handle concurrency.

Design an in-memory hotel booking system

Requirements

Constraints/notes

Solution

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