Solving Double Booking at Scale: System Design Patterns from Top Tech Companies

Gone are the days when people used to stand in long queues to get tickets for concerts, flights, movies, matches and other events.

You can read the free version of the article here.

Tech companies like Ticketmaster, BookMyShow, Airbnb, Delta Airlines, etc have made reservations a one-click experience letting you book tickets from your home.

This simplicity comes from the tech platforms and services that hide and solve complex engineering problems behind the scenes. One such problem is preventing two or more users from booking the same seat.

Imagine the plight of two users who get assigned same seat for an event and realizing this just before the event’s start. It leads to loss of customer trust and the users would think twice before booking their next event.

Hence, it’s important to build a robust solution to solve the classic — Double Booking Problem.

In this article, we will learn how different tech companies solve this problem. Each company has a different use case and there’s no one size fits all solution that solves this problem.

We will go over the different architectural patterns and understand their…