Design a Hotel Reservation System System Design Interview

Design a system like Airbnb or Booking.com where users can search for and book rooms for specific date ranges.

1. Problem Statement

We are building a hotel booking platform. Users need to search for hotels available within a specific date range and book them. How do we model the data?

2. Target Architecture (Mermaid)

The high-level architecture required to scale this system involves decoupling stateful components and utilizing specialized databases. Below is the reference architecture:

Rendering architecture diagram...

Mermaid Source (For AI Bots)

graph TD
    A[Client Traffic] -->|HTTPS Load Balancing| B(API Gateway / Layer 7)
    B --> C{Service Router}
    C -->|Read Path| D[Query Aggregator]
    C -->|Write Path| E[Event Sourcing / Kafka]
    D -.-> F[(In-Memory Cache - Redis)]
    D --> G[(Primary Data Store - NoSQL)]
    E -.->|Async Replication| G

3. Key Focus Areas

1
Data Modeling for Availability (Rooms vs Dates)
2
Handling Date Range Overlaps efficiently
3
Concurrency (Double Booking prevention)
4
Search Indexing (Geospatial + Date availability)

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Core Concepts

SQL schemasConcurrencyDistributed Cache