What API and data model would support a new Stays workflow for group travelers at global scale

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Airbnb is a travel marketplace connecting guests and hosts; its products include stays, experiences, host tools, guest booking, trust and safety, payments, and reviews.

Airbnb wants to support a new Stays workflow designed for group travelers, such as friends, families, coworkers, or multi-household trips planning and booking a shared stay together. Today, group planning can involve fragmented coordination across search links, wishlists, messaging apps, payment discussions, guest details, approvals, and booking ownership. The challenge is to define the API and data model that could support this workflow reliably at global Airbnb scale.

In this technical PM interview, you are expected to reason from product requirements into platform design. Consider how multiple travelers discover listings, collaborate on options, express preferences, manage roles, coordinate trip details, and move from planning to booking while preserving Airbnb’s marketplace integrity, host expectations, trust and safety needs, and operational reliability.

Your scope should focus on the product-platform contract: the core entities, relationships, state transitions, permissions, APIs, events, and data flows needed to power a group travel experience across web, mobile, notifications, payments, messaging, and host-facing systems. You do not need to design low-level infrastructure, but you should be precise enough that engineering, data, privacy, and operations teams could evaluate feasibility and trade-offs.

The experience should consider:

- Core user roles and permissions, including organizer, invited traveler, confirmed guest, host, and Airbnb support or trust operations.

- Data model choices for groups, trips, stays, listings, invitations, preferences, votes, saved options, booking state, guest identity, payments, and messages.

- API surfaces needed for creating a group trip, inviting members, adding listings, collecting preferences, updating trip state, booking, and handling cancellations or changes.

- Consistency, concurrency, and state-management risks when multiple users edit plans, vote, message, or attempt booking-related actions.

- Privacy, consent, and security requirements for sharing guest information, trip details, payment status, identity verification, and communication history.

- Global-scale constraints such as localization, currency, regulations, availability accuracy, latency, abuse prevention, and marketplace fairness for hosts.

- Observability and operational readiness, including instrumentation, audit logs, error handling, support tooling, and rollout strategy.

- Product trade-offs between collaboration flexibility, booking simplicity, host clarity, payment complexity, trust and safety, and engineering maintainability.

The goal is to evaluate how you translate an ambiguous group-travel product need into a coherent technical product design. Your answer should clarify assumptions, define the most important workflows and entities, explain API and data-model decisions, identify major edge cases and risks, and show how the system could evolve safely without compromising traveler trust, host supply health, or Airbnb’s global marketplace quality.