YOUR BRIEF
What to work through
Work through a hotel booking system as a spoken system design interview. Start by clarifying the scope, sketch a working design and explain the trade-offs behind your choices.
- Show a hotel and its room types with the day’s price
- Reserve rooms of a type for a date range, paying in full
- Cancel a reservation
- Let staff manage hotels, rooms and inventory
BEFORE YOU START
Constraints to discuss
- No overbooking beyond the 10% the business allows
- High concurrency in peak season
- A few seconds to confirm a reservation is acceptable
- About 3 reservations a second on average
Need a starting point?
Watch for these common gaps as you prepare:
- Checking availability and then writing without a lock, version or constraint
- No idempotency key, so a double click books twice
- Splitting reservation and inventory into separate databases without a plan for consistency
- Trusting the cache to decide availability
Why this question is in the collection
These sources connect the problem to company interview reports or preparation guides. They do not guarantee what a company will ask you.