Booking software for trek organisers in India

Last checked 18 September 2026

A trek organiser sells the same trek twenty times a season, so the unit that has to be right is the departure, not the trek. 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 trekking company that means one trek page carrying every dated departure with its own seat count, an advance that holds the slot and a balance collected closer to the date, a fitness and medical declaration attached to each trekker's booking, and a base camp check-in that keeps working when the network does not, because the mobile app queues scans on the device and syncs them when signal returns. Orders are created in rupees, so a foreign trekker pays a rupee amount on their card rather than a dollar price you set.

The departure is the thing you sell, not the trek

Kedarkantha is not a product. The 19 December Kedarkantha with 24 slots, two trek leaders and a Dehradun pickup is a product, and so is the 26 December one, and they sell at different speeds to different people. An organiser running six treks across a winter season is running perhaps ninety of these, and almost every spreadsheet that breaks does so because it was built around the trek and not around the departure.

You build the trek once, with its itinerary, its grade, its altitude profile and its inclusions. Each departure then carries its own dates, its own price and its own seat count. The 19 December batch filling does not touch 26 December, and an early-bird rate on one is a separate ticket tier with its own count rather than a discount you remember to stop honouring.

This is the same machinery a fixed-departure tour uses. If you sell dated trips that are not treks as well, booking software for tour operators covers the same ground from that angle.

Capacity is per batch, and it is the number that costs you money

A trek has a hard ceiling that a concert does not. Twenty-four is twenty-four because that is the tentage on the ground, the ratio of leaders to trekkers you are willing to run, and in several states the permit itself. Overselling by two is not a seating problem, it is two people sleeping in the dining tent at 3,400 metres.

Capacity is held against the departure, so the count decrements as bookings confirm and the batch closes itself when it is full. Two things follow, and organisers ask about both:

• An unpaid application does not hold a slot forever. If you use booking approval, a pending application holds a provisional place until you accept or reject it. That is a decision you are meant to make in hours, not a parking space.
• A waitlist is not a feature here. When a batch closes, it closes. Organisers who run waitlists do it by pointing the overflow at the next departure, which is usually what the trekker wanted anyway once they see the date is seven days later.

The advance now, the balance closer to the date

Almost nobody pays the full ₹9,500 for a six-day Himalayan trek eleven weeks out. The standard shape in India is an advance of ₹2,000 to ₹3,000 that holds the slot and a balance due some days before departure, and that is two payments against one booking rather than two bookings.

You set the advance amount and how many days before departure the balance falls due, and those terms are set on the trek, so every departure inherits them. The advance confirms the slot; the balance is collected against the same booking record later. Payments run through the payment gateway, or through manual UPI, where the trekker uploads a payment screenshot that sits in a verify queue until someone on your team accepts or rejects it. A large share of trek advances are paid straight from a UPI app to your VPA with the screenshot sent on WhatsApp, whatever your checkout says. How deposit now and balance later works covers the mechanics on their own.

The fitness declaration, and asking it once per trekker

Every trekking company in India collects a fitness and medical declaration, and almost every one of them collects it twice: once in a form at booking and again on paper at base camp, because the first copy is in a spreadsheet tab that the trek leader standing at Sankri does not have. Custom questions attached to the booking record are how that becomes one copy that the guest list is built from.

The set that earns its place on a high-altitude trek:

• Age, and height and weight. They are the two numbers your leaders use when they have to make a turnaround call.
• Highest altitude previously reached, and when. Someone who has done Triund is not someone who has done Rupin Pass, and both will write 'yes, experienced' in a free-text box.
• Any diagnosed heart, lung, blood pressure or asthma condition, and current medication. Ask about medication in the same question or half the answers omit it.
• Any surgery or injury in the last twelve months affecting knees, ankles or lower back.
• Known reaction to altitude on a previous trek. People who have had acute mountain sickness before usually know it and will tell you if asked directly.
• Dietary needs, with allergy kept in a separate field from preference. A kitchen at 3,400 metres cannot improvise around a peanut allergy it learns about on day three.
• Emergency contact: name, relationship, and a number that works in India.
• Arrival city and rough arrival time. The trekker landing into Dehradun at 11pm is a logistics problem best discovered in advance.

The answers stay on the booking. When you open the guest list for the 19 December batch, the declaration is on the row, not in a form-responses tab from last season.

Check-in at base camp, where there is no network

Sankri has patchy signal on a good day. Most trailheads have none, and a trek leader marking twenty-four arrivals in a notebook at the roadhead is the reason your office does not know who actually boarded until the batch is back.

The Thrivia mobile app scans QR check-ins against a device-local queue. When the phone has no usable connection, the scan is written to a queue stored on the device rather than lost or refused, the gate keeps moving, and the queued scans are replayed to the server automatically when signal comes back. Replay is idempotent, so a trekker who was scanned offline and again online is checked in once. A banner shows how many scans are still pending, and the last sync time once that device has synced at least once.

Check how a competing product defines the word, because it is used two ways. TrekkSoft sells a POS desk and a mobile point-of-sale app and charges per offline booking, where "offline" means a sales channel that is not the website rather than a device operating without internet. On the pages checked on 18 September 2026, neither TrekkSoft nor Sembark publishes a claim about scanning or checking in without a connection, and Sembark's pages describe cloud and real-time sync. That is an absence on those pages, not proof the capability is missing, so ask them directly if it decides your choice.

Two honest limits on that. Load the batch roster while you still have signal, at the hotel in Dehradun or at the last point of coverage on the drive up, because the app can replay scans it took offline but cannot fetch a guest list it has never seen. And this is the mobile app only: the web dashboard's check-in needs a live connection.

Where the enquiries arrive

The other half of a trekking business is the Instagram DM at 11pm asking whether a 42-year-old who walks daily can do Hampta Pass. Answering it well takes five minutes and a look at what the person was told last week, which is the part that is missing when the history is spread across two phones. Enquiries from Instagram, from WhatsApp on your own number and from your website open leads in one pipeline, so the last answer anybody gave is on the record before you type. Turning Instagram DMs into bookings covers that side on its own.

The sheet, the group and the notebook you run now

A season runs like this. The departure list lives in a Google Sheet, one tab per trek, with a column of names per date. Enquiries come to Instagram and WhatsApp, someone quotes, the trekker pays an advance to your UPI QR and sends a screenshot, a name goes into the tab, and a WhatsApp group is made per batch about ten days out. At the roadhead the leader ticks a printed list. For four departures a season this is genuinely fine and a lot of good companies run exactly it. It gives way in the specific places a trek is different from a ticket: ninety batches instead of four, a balance due eleven weeks after the advance, and a gate with no signal.

The expensive part of moving is writing out the departure calendar, because most companies have never had the whole season in one place and building it surfaces the four dates that two people were quoting differently. That is an afternoon. Then you run one season with both, because nobody trusts a screen with a batch's medical declarations until they have watched it hold them once. the gateway's cut stays the gateway's and the Sheet stays for costing.

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 separate. The live catalogue is on pricing, and that page is the one to trust.

Treks are the case where per-booking commission and a flat fee diverge fastest, because the volume is high and the ticket is small. Twelve departures of 24 slots at ₹9,500 is roughly ₹27 lakh of bookings in a season. A 5% commission on that is ₹1.37 lakh. The arithmetic only favours commission if you run one or two batches a year, and if you do, this is not yet a purchase worth making.

When Thrivia is the wrong choice

• You need to publish and settle in dollars or euros. Every departure is priced in rupees, whatever card pays it.
• You need payouts or settlement splits to leaders, drivers and the camp operator. Thrivia does not move money on your behalf. That is your gateway's job and your accountant's.
• You run acquisition on email marketing. There is no email channel at all: no campaigns, no newsletters and no email drips. WhatsApp re-engagement sequences exist behind the AI DM add-on, up to ten approved template messages to a filtered audience of your own leads, but email is not a channel here.
• You need permit or forest-department filings handled. Nothing here talks to a state portal.
• You depend on Zapier, a public API, or a calendar sync. None of those exist.