Booking software for tour operators in India

Last checked 10 September 2026

An Indian tour operator needs two things from software: a listing page that sells a specific departure, and a system that answers enquiries fast enough to convert them. 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. Each trip gets a public page with dated departures and per-batch capacity, deposit-now and balance-later payments through Razorpay or manual UPI, custom questions, a guest list and QR check-in. Instagram DMs, WhatsApp messages and website enquiries land in one inbox with a lead pipeline behind it. It does not do payouts or international card payments, so an operator selling mainly to foreign tourists in USD should look elsewhere.

What a tour operator's booking page actually needs

The same Kasol trek runs eleven times between March and June. Each departure has its own van and its own guide, and the March batch selling out says nothing about the May one. So the minimum a listing page has to carry is:

• Departures and batches, each with its own dates, its own price and its own capacity, sold from one trip page rather than eleven copies of it.
• A deposit now, balance later flow, because nobody pays ₹18,000 for a Spiti trip off an Instagram story in one go.
• Custom questions at checkout: age, emergency contact, blood group, food preference, trek experience, ID number, whatever your ops sheet needs so you are not chasing it on WhatsApp in departure week.
• A guest list per departure that your trip lead can open on the day, plus QR check-in at the pickup point, including offline scanning where there is no signal.
• An itinerary on the page itself, day by day, with the accommodation named, so the enquiry that arrives has already read what is included.
• Approval before payment for anything you screen, a Himalayan high-altitude trek or a women-only batch, so you can reject a booking rather than refund it.

Thrivia does all of the above. Most trips, though, are lost before a traveller ever reaches that page.

Where the booking is lost

Bookings go in the four hours between a DM landing and somebody replying to it. The enquiry arrives on Instagram at 11pm. The same person also messages the WhatsApp number in your bio. Your co-founder answers one of the two, nobody knows the other exists, and by the time you reply the traveller has booked with whoever answered first. No software category has a line item for this.

What Thrivia puts against that gap:

• A unified conversations inbox. Instagram DMs, WhatsApp on your own WhatsApp Business Cloud API number, and website enquiries land in one thread list, so two people on your team stop answering the same traveller twice.
• A lead CRM with a pipeline and intent scoring. Every enquiry becomes a lead with a stage, so 'asked about the June batch, wants a lower berth' is a record, not a memory. Intent scoring pushes the ones who asked about price and dates to the top.
• 3-touch nudges. A lead that goes quiet gets followed up automatically, three times, instead of never.
• An AI DM sales agent that answers the standard questions (what is included, what is the fitness level, is there a bus from Delhi) at 2am in your own words, and hands over to you when the traveller is ready to book.
• Meta Lead Ads connector and website lead capture, so a paid-ads lead or a form on your site arrives in the same pipeline rather than in a CSV someone downloads on Friday.
• Follow-up tasks for the calls you have to make yourself, like confirming the balance payment ten days before departure.

How departures and capacity work

You create the trip once: title, itinerary, inclusions, photos, accommodation. Then you add departures to it. Each departure carries its own start and end date and its own seat count, and the page shows the traveller a date picker rather than a wall of near-identical listings.

Capacity is held per batch, not per trip. If the 14 March departure has 18 seats and 18 people have paid, that date closes and the next one stays open. Ticket tiers sit on top of this, so an early-bird price that ends on a date, a shared-room rate and a solo rate can all exist on the same departure, each with its own count. Coupons and referral codes work at the tier level, which is how most operators run their community and repeat-traveller discounts.

Taking the money: deposit now, balance later

You set a deposit, the traveller pays it to hold the seat, and the balance is due later. Payments run through Razorpay, or through manual UPI, where the traveller uploads a payment screenshot and it sits in a verify queue until someone on your team accepts or rejects it. A meaningful share of Indian travellers will send a UPI screenshot no matter what you build. Refunds are handled in-product, and pay-what-you-want exists for the operators who run donation-based community walks.

The WhatsApp, sheet and UPI QR setup you have now

Right now a Kasol seat sells like this. The enquiry lands in Instagram DMs, you send the itinerary as four screenshots and a voice note, they ask whether the June batch is open, you check the sheet tab called Departures FINAL v3, you send the UPI QR from your phone gallery, they pay ₹5,000 and send back a screenshot, and you type their name into row 47. Two of you can run that for 30 bookings a month without much trouble, and for a lot of operators it is the right answer for years. It gives way in five specific places.

Switching costs you a weekend and a fortnight of forgetting. Someone has to type the trips in, write out the itineraries properly for the first time, and decide what the checkout questions are, which is the slow part because nobody has written them down before. Your team has to answer DMs in an inbox rather than on their own phones, and for two weeks they will keep picking up the phone. The sheet does not disappear either: most operators keep one for costing and vendor payments, because that is not what this is. Under roughly ten bookings a month, the trade is not obviously worth making.

What it costs

Thrivia is a monthly subscription with an included booking allowance, not a per-ticket commission. Plans start at ₹2,999 a month plus 18% GST at the entry rung and move up by how many bookings and admin seats you need, with cheaper effective rates on a six-month or annual term. Payment gateway charges are separate and are Razorpay's, not Thrivia's. The current catalogue, including the AI add-on, is on pricing. Trust that page over this paragraph.

Run 40 bookings a month at ₹15,000 average and a 5% commission model costs ₹30,000 a month. A flat subscription wins at that volume, and loses for someone running two trips a year, who is better off on a free listing marketplace or a payment link.

Comparing the four ways operators do this

When Thrivia is the wrong choice

Finding this out after you have migrated is expensive:

• You sell mainly to foreign tourists paying in USD or EUR. There are no international card payments and no Stripe. Use a global platform.
• You need payouts, settlement or split payments to guides and vendors. Thrivia does not do it. That is your payment gateway's job.
• You depend on Zapier, a public API, or a calendar sync. None of those exist.

For a fixed-departure trek business selling to Indian travellers on Instagram and WhatsApp, that list is mostly things you were never going to use. If you run residential wellness or yoga programmes, retreat booking pages covers the same ground with the accommodation side in front.