Retreat and yoga teacher training booking software in India

Last checked 10 September 2026

A retreat host in India needs to read who is applying before taking their money, hold the seat with a deposit, and collect the balance weeks later. Thrivia is India's booking and ticketing platform for tour operators, trek leaders, and retreat & fest hosts to sell tickets, take bookings, and manage guests. For a retreat that means a booking approval workflow that holds an application unpaid until you accept it, custom registration questions attached to the booking record, deposit-now and balance-later payments through Razorpay or manual UPI with a proof-upload verify queue, refunds against policy tiers, batch-wise dates for a course that repeats, and a guest list with QR check-in on arrival day. There are no international card payments, so a Rishikesh school whose students pay in dollars will not be able to check them out.

The order of operations for a retreat

Twenty-two people living together for three weeks is a different sale from twenty-two people at a concert. One wrong admission changes the room for everybody else, and you cannot refund your way out of it once the person has arrived. You read the applicant first, decide second, and take money third.

Almost every booking tool does it the other way round, because it was built for tickets. The ones that were built for retreats, Retreat Guru and WeTravel, are built for retreat centres in Bali, Costa Rica and Portugal selling in dollars. Their checkout does not expect a UPI screenshot, their support hours are not IST, and their pricing assumes a booking three times the size of a Dharamkot yoga week.

Screening an applicant before you take the money

Here is the sequence for a 200-hour teacher training run through a booking approval workflow:

1. The applicant fills the registration form on the batch page and submits. No money moves. The booking sits as pending, holding a provisional place against that batch's capacity.
2. Their answers arrive attached to the booking record itself, not in a separate form-responses sheet you have to match up by email address later.
3. You read the practice history, the injury answer and the 'why now' answer. This is a ten-minute job per applicant and it is the only part that cannot be automated.
4. You approve or you reject. A rejection at this point costs you one awkward message. A rejection after payment costs you a bank transfer and an argument.
5. Approval opens payment for the deposit only. The seat is confirmed when the deposit lands, and the balance is collected closer to the start date.
6. The confirmed applicant joins the guest list for that specific batch, which your studio manager works from on arrival day, with QR check-in at the gate.

A wellness retreat attracts a small number of people in genuine crisis, who need a therapist rather than a shared kitchen and a 5am bell. Reading their own words about why they are coming is how you find that out in advance. A payment page does not ask.

The registration questions worth asking

Custom questions are free to add and expensive to leave out, because everything you do not ask here becomes a WhatsApp message in the week you are least free. The set below is what actually earns its place on a retreat or YTT form:

• How long have you practised, and how many times a week in the last three months? Two numbers. Years alone tells you nothing, because plenty of people have practised for a decade at twice a month.
• Which style, and with which teacher or school? An Ashtanga practitioner arriving into a Hatha and yoga-nidra TTC will be disappointed by day three, and you would both rather know now.
• Any injury, surgery or diagnosed condition in the last twelve months that affects wrists, shoulders, knees or lower back? Ask about medication currently being taken in the same question.
• Are you pregnant or within six months postpartum?
• Dietary requirements, separating a preference from an allergy. 'Vegetarian, no onion garlic' and 'anaphylactic to peanuts' both arrive in a free-text box and one of them is a kitchen emergency. Make it two fields.
• Why this course, and why now? Two or three sentences, mandatory. It filters the people treating a 200-hour course as a cheap month in the hills, and it is the field most schools forget to add.
• Do you intend to teach afterwards, or is this for your own practice? Changes how you place them in practicum groups.
• Arrival date, arrival city and rough arrival time. The person landing at Dehradun at 11pm is a logistics problem you want to know about in advance rather than at 11pm.
• Emergency contact: name, relationship and a phone number that works in India.

Deposits, the balance, and the UPI screenshot

Nobody pays ₹78,000 for a teacher training in one tap four months out. You set a deposit, the applicant pays it to hold the seat once you have approved them, and the balance is due on a date you choose. Payments run through Razorpay, or through manual UPI, where the guest uploads a payment screenshot and it waits in a verify queue until someone on your team accepts or rejects it.

Manual UPI carries a large share of retreat deposits in India. Students pay ₹15,000 straight from a UPI app to your VPA and send the screenshot on WhatsApp whatever your checkout says, and a verify queue turns that into a booking record instead of a message someone has to remember. Refunds are issued in-product against your policy tiers, and coupons and referral codes work per ticket tier, which is how most schools run their alumni and returning-student rates.

A cancellation policy you can copy

Most Indian retreat pages carry one line saying deposits are non-refundable, which loses arguments because it does not say what happens in the ten situations that actually come up. A tiered policy does. Refund policy tiers are configurable per event, so the structure below can be set once and reused across batches:

Two clauses worth adding underneath. Medical cancellation with documentation moves up one tier, not to a full refund. And a visa refusal for an inbound student is treated as any other cancellation, because you cannot carry that risk for them.

Batches, the page itself, and where enquiries arrive

A school running a 200-hour course six times a year should not be maintaining six near-identical pages. You build the course once with its itinerary, its daily schedule and its accommodation named, then add each batch with its own dates, price and seat count. The February cohort filling does not close March. Early-bird and returning-student rates sit as separate ticket tiers on the same batch, each with its own count.

The other half of a retreat business is the enquiry that arrives at 1am from a stranger on Instagram asking whether they are experienced enough. Those DMs, WhatsApp messages on your own number, and website enquiries land in one inbox with a lead pipeline behind them, so two people in your school stop answering the same applicant separately. If you also sell fixed-departure trips or treks, booking software for tour operators covers the same product from that angle, and what you actually need from a travel website covers putting the checkout onto a site you already own.

How a school fills a batch today, and where that gives way

The 200-hour batch fills like this. An enquiry arrives in Instagram DMs, you send a Google Form link, the answers pile up in a Sheet, you read them on an evening when you are free, you reply on WhatsApp saying yes you would be a good fit, you send the UPI QR, they pay ₹15,000, and you write the name in a tab. For one batch a year with eighteen students this is fine, and a lot of schools with waiting lists run exactly this. The strain shows in the two places a retreat is different from a ticket: reading someone before you take their money, and the four months between the deposit and the balance.

The expensive part of moving is writing the registration questions down, because most schools have never had them anywhere except in the head of whoever does the calls, and agreeing that 'why now' is mandatory takes an afternoon and an argument. Building the course and its batches after that is an hour. Then there is a first batch where you run both, because you will not trust a screen with twenty-two people's dietary answers until you have watched it hold them once. Razorpay's cut stays Razorpay's, the Sheet stays for costing, and if a good share of your students are foreign, none of this reaches them.

What it costs

Thrivia is a monthly subscription with an included booking allowance, not a commission per booking. Plans start at ₹2,999 a month plus 18% GST at the entry rung and rise with bookings and admin seats, with better effective rates on six-month and annual terms. Payment gateway charges are Razorpay's and are separate. The live catalogue is on pricing, and that page is the one to trust.

The arithmetic favours a subscription earlier here than it does for day trips, because retreat tickets are large. One 20-seat teacher training at ₹65,000 a seat is ₹13 lakh of bookings, and a 5% commission on that is ₹65,000 for a single batch. Run two batches a year and a flat monthly fee is not a close call. Run one small retreat a year and it is the wrong purchase.

When Thrivia is the wrong choice

• Most of your students pay in dollars or euros. No international cards, no Stripe. For an inbound-heavy Rishikesh or Goa school this is disqualifying on its own.
• You need payouts, settlement, or splits to visiting teachers and the venue. Thrivia does not move money on your behalf. That is your gateway's job and your accountant's.
• You run your marketing on email sequences. There are no email campaigns and no drip automations. Follow-up here is one-to-one against a lead record.
• You depend on Zapier, a public API, or a calendar sync. None of those exist.

For an Indian school selling mostly to Indian students who find you on Instagram and pay by UPI, that list is largely things you were never going to use. For a centre whose income is inbound foreign students, the first line is the whole answer.