project-proposal-2025

Hostelglobe - Your Global Booking Companion

Abstract

Hostelglobe will be the next leading global Online Travel Agent focused on the hostel market, inspiring adventurous minds to experience new places, meet new people and come home with extraordinary stories to tell. It is an accommodation booking platform inspired by services like Hostelworld and Booking.com. What are you waiting for, what will your next adventure be?

Author

Name: Just Lunde Broch

Student number: 49084362

Functionality

Hostelglobe focuses on creating a scalable and reliable backend system that can serve as the foundation for a future web or mobile application. The system will use a RESTful API for searching listings and making bookings, and will be deployed to the cloud with basic monitoring. Key quality attributes are scalability and reliability, which are crucial to ensure the system can handle real world use and unexpected downtime. If the entire system was built, Hostelglobe would deliver:

• Account creation and login for users and hosts.
• Host ability to list and manage accommodations.
• A searchable list of hostels and other accommodations worldwide
• Filtering options by availability, location, rating, price, facilities and number of beds.
• Hostel profile pages with photos, reviews and availability calendars.
• A booking system to make or cancel bookings.
• Messaging between hosts and guests, and between the guests themselves.
• Being able to leave reviews and ratings.
• Hostel management dashboard for listing updates and availability control.
• Related articles about traveling – marketing why people should use their product.
• Social features like being able to see which other user profiles are staying at the same hostel at the same time.
• Payment processing directly integrated in the app.

Scope

The MVP is the fundamental functionality to be delivered at Hostelglobe. It will include:

• A REST API to view and retrieve accommodation listings.
• Search functionality by a few selected locations with filtering possibilities like number of beds, price and rating.
• Basic hostel profiles including name, description, city, image.
• The backend will be deployed to a cloud service such as AWS using Docker.
• Simple frontend and user interface for listing and booking.
• A small set of automated tests such as checking health endpoint and booking logic.

Quality Attributes

Reliability

Reliability ensures that Hostelglobe consistently performs its expected functionality, even under failures. In Hostelglobe, it is measured by successful uptime, consistent response from endpoints, and recovery from manual service restarts. Also, it takes advantage of techniques like health endpoint for monitoring, basic logging, and restart tests using cloud platform features.

Scalability

Scalability ensures that Hostelglobe can handle an increasing number of users and requests. This is highly relevant during the holiday seasons. This attribute is crucial for any booking platform that may grow in popularity. The degree of scalability is measured by response time and API availability under simulated multi-user traffic. It uses techniques like Cloud deployment with container support (such as Docker), stateless API design and lightweight database queries.

Prioritization

If trade-offs are necessary in Hostelglobe, reliability will be prioritized over scalability, as a reliable experience is essential even under low to moderate traffic.

Evaluation

I will evaluate the success of the Hostelglobe MVP and whether it has achieved the desired attributes by looking at the two selected quality attributes.

Reliability

• I can set up a basic health endpoint to check that the system runs as it should.
• I can deploy the backend to a cloud platform with a health check by for instance pinging the API endpoint every minute.
• Manually simulate failure (stop and restart service) and confirm that the system recovers and continues serving requests.
• Observe logs and uptime to verify consistent behavior over time.

Scalability

• I can simulate multiple users sending requests by using Postman or a basic script.
• I can measure how the API handles concurrent requests.
• I can evaluate whether response times remain stable under small load or not.