System Design of Airbnb Part 1 - User, Listings, Search & Availability

Building the Foundation of an Airbnb-Like Platform — A Deep Dive into User Profiles, Listing Management, Search & Discovery, and Real-Time Availability.

There are only a handful of blogs that dive into the system design of various Airbnb features. Covering all those features in a single post or interview can be overwhelming, so I’ll break it down into a series of three blogs.

The key components we’ll explore are:

• User Profiles, Listing Management, Search & Discovery, Availability Service

• Booking & Reservations, Payment, Reviews & Ratings

• Messaging System, Notifications, Trust & Safety, Customer Support

In Part 1, we’ll focus on User Profiles, Listing Management, Search & Discovery, and Availability Service.
In Part 2, we’ll cover Booking & Reservations, Payment, and Reviews & Ratings.
In Part 3, we’ll dive into Messaging System, Notifications, Trust & Safety, and Customer Support.

1. Understand Question as User (2 mins)

We need to design core components of an Airbnb-like system. Specifically:

1. User Profiles – to manage user accounts, personal information, and potentially host/guest details.

2. Listing Management – for hosts to create, edit, and mana…