How much deposit should you take, and how do you collect the balance?

Last checked 10 September 2026

Size the deposit from the money you commit before departure, not from a round percentage. On a 12-seat Kedarkantha batch at ₹9,500 a seat, the homestay advance at 21 days out and the vehicle advance at 14 days out come to ₹36,000 for the batch, or ₹3,000 a seat, and those are spent whether or not the seat is filled. So ₹3,000 is the floor: anything less and every late dropout costs you cash. Then run the balance on fixed day offsets from departure, with the final reminder landing before the first non-refundable payment leaves your account, not after. Splitting a payment is free on a flat percentage and costs about ₹3.54 extra where the gateway charges a fixed amount per transaction, because you pay that fixed amount twice.

Most operators pick a deposit by feel. Twenty percent, or ₹2,000 because that is what the last person charged. Then a traveller drops out eleven days before departure, you refund everything above the deposit because that is what your page says, and you discover you had already paid the homestay for a bed nobody will sleep in. A deposit is the size of the hole a cancellation leaves, and that is a number you can work out.

Size the deposit from money you have already committed

Write down every rupee that leaves your account before departure day, when it leaves, and whether it comes back if one person drops. Take a six-day Kedarkantha winter batch, 12 seats, ₹9,500 a seat.

Only the first two rows matter. Ration and permits scale with headcount, so a dropout simply means buying less. The homestay and the vehicle do not scale, and together they are ₹36,000 for the batch, or ₹3,000 a seat. That is your floor. A ₹9,500 trip with a ₹3,000 deposit is 31.6%, which sounds high until you price the alternative.

Take ₹1,000 instead. Someone cancels twelve days out, you refund the ₹8,500 balance, and you are ₹2,000 down on a seat you cannot resell in twelve days. Three of those in a season is ₹6,000 gone on trips that ran full on paper. A deposit at the floor is what turns that refund back into an empty seat.

There is a ceiling too, and it is a judgement rather than a calculation: the deposit has to be small enough that somebody who found you on an Instagram story will pay it in one tap. If your floor lands above roughly a third of the ticket, the honest fix is to move your own commitments later or to negotiate a refundable advance with the property, not to hope nobody cancels.

The collection timeline, in days before departure

Your last reminder has to land before your first non-refundable payment goes out. Most operators have it the other way round, chasing the balance in departure week, by which point the homestay advance is already spent and a no-payer costs real money instead of an empty seat. Same trek, ₹3,000 deposit, ₹6,500 balance.

Three reminders and then a release, rather than an open-ended chase. If you cannot bring yourself to release the seat at day 21, you do not have a policy, you have a hope, and every traveller who has booked with you twice already knows it.

What splitting the payment costs you

Operators worry that taking money twice means paying fees twice. On a flat percentage it does not. Take a ₹2,000 booking as one charge, or as a ₹500 deposit and a ₹1,500 balance, and at Razorpay's published 2% with 18% GST on the fee, both come to ₹47.20.

The whole difference is one extra ₹3, because the fixed component is charged twice instead of once, plus 54 paise of GST on it. On a ₹2,000 trek deposit that is noise. On a ₹600 day walk where you take a ₹200 advance, the fixed fee is most of what you pay, so take the ₹600 in one go. The rate cards behind these two numbers, along with PayU and Cashfree, are worked through in payment gateways for Indian tour operators.

The five weeks between the deposit and the balance

The deposit is the easy half and you already have it working. Somebody pays ₹3,000 on your UPI ID or a gateway link, you write their name on the batch's sheet tab, and the seat is theirs. Then five weeks pass in which nothing in your setup knows that a booking is half paid, and everything below happens in that gap.

What this does not do is the arithmetic at the top of this page. The deposit floor and the day offsets are still half an hour with your own vendor advances, and nobody else can work out that the homestay is ₹2,000 a seat and the ration is not. Setup is typing each trip in once with its departures, its deposit amount and its balance date, which for eight batches a season is an evening. The part that stings is that the dates become real: once the nudges have gone out on day 32, 27 and 23, releasing the seat on day 21 is a decision you wrote down rather than one you can quietly skip. The money still moves through your own Razorpay account or your own UPI ID, unchanged.

Collecting it without living in WhatsApp

The timeline above is easy to write and miserable to run by hand, because every row is a person to message and a payment to match against a name. It survives contact with reality when the deposit and the balance belong to one booking record instead of two unrelated payments arriving five weeks apart. At day 21 you then read a list of who has paid, rather than reconstructing it from a chat thread.

Thrivia works that way. The deposit amount and the balance due date are set on the departure. The reminders at day 32, 27 and 23 go out as automated 3-touch nudges. The call you would rather make yourself, to the traveller who paid a deposit and went quiet, sits as a follow-up task instead of in your head. Each departure holds its own seat count, so releasing a seat at day 21 puts it back on sale on that date and not on the others. The replies a reminder provokes, on Instagram or WhatsApp or through your site, land in one inbox, which matters mostly because two people answering the same traveller is how a balance gets collected twice.

Payment runs through Razorpay, or through manual UPI, where the traveller uploads proof at checkout and the booking waits in a host verify queue until someone on your team accepts or rejects it. That is the ₹47.20 above that you keep, without the screenshot living in an inbox. Where you screen people before taking money, booking approval holds the application unpaid until you accept it. The day-21 release itself follows refund policy tiers you set once per event.

UPI Autopay, and what stays unverified here

Someone will suggest UPI Autopay, where the traveller approves a mandate once in their UPI app at deposit time and the balance is debited on the due date with no chasing at all. It is a real NPCI mechanism, banks and gateways sell it, and it is the right shape for a balance with a date on it.

Thrivia does not offer UPI Autopay, so the balance there is collected as a payment on the due date and chased by the nudges above.

The same method, three trip shapes

The arithmetic does not change, only the answers do.

• A ₹1,200 day walk. Nothing is committed in advance except your own time. Take the full amount at booking. A deposit here buys you nothing and costs you a fixed fee twice.
• A fixed-departure trek. The worked example above. The floor is whatever does not scale with headcount, the balance lands a few days before your first advance goes out, and the seat is released rather than argued about. More on running these in booking software for tour operators.
• A residential retreat or teacher training. The ticket is large and the lead time is months, so the deposit is a smaller share of a much bigger number, and the interesting question moves from sizing to what happens on cancellation at 60, 30 and 15 days out. That tier structure is written out in full in retreat booking software.

Whichever shape you run, the deposit number should be defensible in one sentence to a traveller who asks why it is not refundable. "Because your bed at Sankri is paid for three weeks before you arrive" is a sentence people accept. "Because that is our policy" is the one that ends up in a review.

Thrivia's own price is a monthly subscription with an included booking allowance rather than a cut of each deposit, so splitting a payment in two does not cost you anything on this side of it. Current plans are on pricing, and gateway charges stay separate and stay your gateway's.