Multi-service trip booking consistency
Design the booking/transaction flow for a travel platform where a single 'trip' purchase must reserve a flight, a hotel, and a car — each owned by a different microservice with its own database, possibly in different regions. The whole trip must be all-or-nothing from the user's view (no charging for a flight if the hotel can't be booked), but you cannot run a distributed ACID transaction across these independent services. How do you keep the booking consistent?
What a strong answer looks like
Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts (data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes) and name the trade-offs you are making.
Clarify5:30 left
Estimate5:30 planned
Design16:30 planned
Deep dive13:30 planned
Failure9:00 planned
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.
Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.