How Booking Holdings Interviews in 2026: Process, Questions & What They Score

1. 01

   Award Top K Hotels: a processing and ranking problem that returns the top K hotels.

   Tests ranking and top-K selection over hotel data, typically with a heap or a sort.

2. 02

   Maximal Square: find the largest square of 1s in a binary matrix.

   Tests 2D dynamic programming, tracking the largest square ending at each cell.

3. 03

   You are given payment and booking logs in JSON. Write code that processes them into a report for the payment operations team, then handle follow-up scenarios and discuss runtime complexity.

   Tests parsing and aggregating JSON records into a report, then reasoning about time complexity as requirements change.

4. 04

   Itinerary Planner: reconstruct a complete trip from a list of tickets or travel legs.

   Tests rebuilding a path from unordered legs with a hash map and graph traversal, like Reconstruct Itinerary.

5. 05

   Sliding Window Maximum.

   Tests the monotonic deque technique for an O(n) maximum over a moving window.

6. 06

   Rolling Average Booking Threshold: find the dates where the 7-day average of bookings falls below a threshold.

   Tests sliding window or prefix sums to compute a rolling average in O(n).

7. 07

   Hotel CRUD and Proximity Search: implement CRUD endpoints for hotels and a proximity search using the Haversine formula, starting from provided boilerplate.

   Tests REST endpoint design for CRUD plus distance filtering with the Haversine formula.

8. 08

   Given a list of hotel bookings with check-in and check-out dates, find the maximum number of overlapping bookings at any time.

   Tests interval overlap with a sweep line over sorted check-in and check-out events.

9. 09

   Implement an LRU cache with O(1) get and put operations, for example for storing hotel search results. Explain the data structures you would use.

   Tests a hash map plus a doubly linked list to give O(1) get and put.

10. 10

    Find unique words in a given string.

    Tests string tokenizing and a hash set to deduplicate words.

11. 11

    Can you implement a function that returns the first n chars of a text without breaking any word?

    Tests string boundary handling by cutting at the last word boundary within n characters.

12. 12

    Explain what a HashMap is.

    Tests hashing basics: buckets, collisions and average O(1) lookup.

13. 13

    A user reports that sometimes their search results for hotels in Paris are empty. Debug the problem.

    Tests debugging a search flow by isolating filters, data and edge cases behind empty results.

Reported problems, listed so you know what to expect. Practice them in your own editor or on the platform you prefer; SupaCV's practice mode coaches how you talk through them.

1. 01

   Design a service to detect and block fraudulent credit cards for the book now, pay later feature. A third-party API supplies a list of newly reported fraudulent cards.

   Tests a real-time fraud screening service that ingests a third-party feed and blocks bookings before confirmation.

2. 02

   Design a hotel booking and availability system.

   Tests inventory modelling, preventing double booking under concurrency, and read-heavy scaling.

3. 03

   Design a centralized logging system.

   Tests log ingestion pipelines, storage and indexing, retention and querying at scale.

4. 04

   Design a distributed rate limiter for the Booking.com API.

   Tests distributed rate limiting, such as token bucket with shared counters across servers.

5. 05

   Design the backend for Booking.com's search functionality. How would you handle millions of concurrent searches?

   Tests scaling a read-heavy search backend with sharding, caching, indexing and load handling.

6. 06

   Design a system to recommend hotels to users based on their past booking history, search queries, and current location.

   Tests recommender architecture: signal collection, candidate generation, ranking and serving at scale.

7. 07

   Design a real-time notification system for booking confirmations across web, mobile, and email.

   Tests multi-channel fan-out with queues, retries and delivery guarantees.

8. 08

   Can you design a small feature for Booking.com's portal?

   Tests scoping an open-ended feature: requirements, components, data model and trade-offs.

Reported problems, listed so you know what to expect. Practice them in your own editor or on the platform you prefer; SupaCV's practice mode coaches how you talk through them.

1. 01

   Explain what you know about A/B testing.

   Tests experiment design basics: control and variant groups, sample size, significance and metrics.

Reported problems, listed so you know what to expect. Practice them in your own editor or on the platform you prefer; SupaCV's practice mode coaches how you talk through them.

1. 01

   How do you handle disagreements with teammates about technical approaches?

2. 02

   Share about a time when you had to meet tight deadlines.

3. 03

   Tell me about a time you went above and beyond for a customer or user.

4. 04

   Describe a complex project you owned from start to finish. What challenges did you face?

5. 05

   Tell me about a time you shipped a feature that didn't perform as expected. What did you learn?

6. 06

   Describe a situation where you received critical feedback. How did you respond?

7. 07

   Tell me about a time you had to learn a new technology quickly. How did you approach it?

8. 08

   Describe a situation where you had to make a technical decision with incomplete data.

1. 01

   Why did you choose Booking.com?

2. 02

   Explain Booking.com's business model and how we make money from it.

3. 03

   What metrics have you used to measure the success of a product you were involved in recently?

4. 04

   Talk about how you validate your decisions.

5. 05

   Do you have any expectations for this position?