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Airbnb Reservation System Design
Visual Problem Diagram
Scenario
A guest tries to book a beach house for a holiday weekend while another guest is checking out and a host calendar import is running in the background. The system must let many people browse quickly, but only one reservation may own each night when checkout commits.
Design the reservation subsystem for short-term rentals: per-listing calendars, booking a date range, payment integration, pricing, external calendar sync, and cancellations. Hosts lose trust on calendar double-booking, and guests lose trust when the price changes at the last second.
You should support availability, reserve/confirm, pricing quotes, payment hold/capture, cancel/refund, fraud checks, and host calendar sync hooks. Be ready to explain why checking availability is not the same as booking.
Constraints
Calendar per listing, date-range availability, hold and confirm, pricing quote, payment authorization and capture, cancel and refund, host calendar import and export.
No overlapping confirmed reservations for the same listing-night, stable quote during hold, safe retries for checkout and refund, clear UX on conflict.
Millions of listings, read-heavy browsing traffic, sharp contention on holiday dates and viral properties, external calendar sync lag.
Stages ahead
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