Which payment gateway should an Indian tour operator use?

Last checked 10 September 2026

For an Indian tour operator selling in rupees, the published rate is close to identical across the big gateways, so the choice is rarely about price. Taking ₹2,000 costs ₹47.20 through Razorpay or PayU at their listed 2%, which is 2.36% once 18% GST on the fee is added, and ₹50.74 through Instamojo, whose 2% carries a ₹3 per-transaction charge on top. International cards run near 3.5% all in. Cashfree does not publish a standard domestic rate at all, only a limited-period offer. The cheapest route is still no gateway: a traveller paying your own UPI ID costs you nothing, at the price of verifying each payment by hand. Pick on settlement speed, on whether you need international cards, and on what your booking system already integrates with, then negotiate once your monthly volume gives you something to negotiate with.

On rupee bookings the big gateways cost within a few paise of each other, so price rarely decides it. Settlement speed, international cards and what your booking system already supports decide it. The arithmetic is below anyway, because few comparisons bother to add the GST.

What it costs to take ₹2,000

₹2,000 is about a weekend trek deposit, so that is the number to do by hand. Every rate below was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 10 Sep 2026 and is listed in the sources at the foot of this page. The fee itself attracts 18% GST, which most comparison articles leave out, and which is the difference between 2% and 2.36%.

Cashfree publishes no standard domestic rate on its charges page, only that festive offer and the line that UPI charges are "as per the applicable law", so a merchant outside the offer cannot price the product before signing up. PayU publishes 2% for cards, netbanking and wallets and no standard merchant UPI rate. Neither of those is a scandal, but check both against a written quote before you build a season's margin on a number you read in a blog post.

Why UPI is not free even though MDR is zero

Operators hear that UPI carries no merchant discount rate and expect UPI bookings to cost nothing. The MDR really is zero. What Razorpay charges on a UPI booking is a platform fee, its own charge for running the checkout, the reconciliation and the settlement, and at 2% it is the same as its card rate. Cashfree words the same split differently, pricing UPI "as per the applicable law" and charging its platform fee alongside.

So there is no UPI cost to pass through to your traveller, because the thing you are paying is the gateway's fee for its software, not a levy on the payment. If you want the buyer to carry it, put it in the ticket price. Before you add a visible convenience fee line on top of a UPI or RuPay payment, get your gateway's position on it in writing, because that is the case where surcharging rules bite hardest.

The genuinely free route is a UPI QR or a payment link from your own bank, where the traveller pays you directly and sends a screenshot. It costs nothing and it costs you an hour a day, because somebody has to match every screenshot against a booking.

What a UPI collect request is, and why it is going away

A collect request is the pull version of UPI. You enter the traveller's UPI ID at checkout, they get a request inside their own UPI app, and they approve it with their UPI PIN. Nothing leaves their account until they do. The push version, called intent, is the one where tapping a button opens GPay or PhonePe with the amount already filled in, and scanning a QR is the same thing by another route.

Balance collection is where operators feel it, since the standard move was to fire a collect request at somebody a fortnight before departure. Send a payment link instead.

Deposit now, balance later, and what splitting costs

Almost no Indian traveller pays ₹18,000 for a Spiti trip in one tap, so the money arrives in two pieces. On a pure percentage that split is free. A ₹2,000 deposit and an ₹8,000 balance through Razorpay costs 2.36% of each, the same 2.36% you would have paid on a single ₹10,000 charge, or ₹236 either way.

It stops being free the moment there is a fixed component. The same split on Instamojo's 2% + ₹3 costs ₹3.54 more than the single charge, because you pay the ₹3, plus GST on it, twice. That is small on a trek and less small if you run a ₹600 day walk and take a ₹200 advance on it, where the fixed fee is most of the cost.

Check the refund side too. Refunding a booking gives you back the amount you took, not the fee you paid on it, so a cancellation-heavy season is a real cost line and not a rounding error.

The row that costs nothing, and what it costs instead

The last row is the one operators already use and rarely count. When a traveller pays your UPI ID or scans your own QR, no gateway is in the path, so nobody takes a percentage. On ₹2,000 that is ₹47.20 you keep, and across a hundred bookings a season it is ₹4,720. It is why the WhatsApp screenshot refuses to die: it is genuinely the cheapest way to get paid in India.

What it costs is everything after the money arrives. Nobody reconciles it, so a person opens the screenshot, checks the amount and the UTR against the bank statement, and marks the seat held. There is no chargeback protection and no dispute process, refunds go back out as your own transfer, and two people doing this in the same inbox will double-book a departure eventually.

Thrivia runs that flow as a queue instead of a chat. The traveller picks the departure, uploads the proof at checkout, and the booking sits pending against a real seat until someone on your team accepts or rejects it, at which point the guest list, the balance reminder and the QR check-in all follow from the same record. You keep the ₹47.20 and lose the reconciliation.

Most operators end up running both. Manual UPI for the travellers who prefer it and for the deposits, a gateway for the people who want a card and for anything you would rather not chase, and the same booking record underneath either way.

The QR, the screenshots and the sheet

Most operators run four things at once: a static UPI QR saved in the phone gallery and sent to whoever asks, payment screenshots landing in WhatsApp, a Google Sheet with a paid column, and a gateway payment link pasted into the chat for the people who want a card. Nobody chose that stack, it accumulated, and it is a sane thing to be running. It costs nothing per booking, it took twenty minutes to set up, and it works on the phone the operator already has.

What switching costs is an evening of setup and one habit. Your departures, ticket types and refund policy have to go in once, and then you have to stop forwarding the QR and start sending the booking link, which is the harder half. Travellers will keep sending screenshots on WhatsApp anyway and you will keep opening them, the difference being that the accept lands against a seat rather than a row you type yourself. The sheet is the only part that goes away outright. Thrivia is a monthly subscription, so the ₹0 per booking on manual UPI stays ₹0, and the year is not free.

TCS on foreign tour packages

This one has nothing to do with your gateway and catches operators anyway. If you sell an overseas tour programme package, you have to collect tax at source from the traveller on top of the package price and deposit it. Domestic trips are outside it entirely, so a Himachal trek business can stop reading here.

Under the Finance Act 2026 position summarised by PwC, the rate on an overseas tour programme package is 2% up to ₹10 lakh and 20% on the amount above that, down from the 5% that applied below the threshold before. On a ₹1.5 lakh Bali package that is ₹3,000 you collect and remit, and the traveller claims it back against their own tax. Your gateway will not do any of this for you. Confirm the current position with your CA before you quote a season of prices on it.

Where a booking system sits in this

Thrivia is not a payment gateway and has no payouts or settlement. You connect your own Razorpay account, the money settles to your bank on Razorpay's cycle at Razorpay's rates, and Thrivia never touches it. What it does is the part the gateway leaves on your desk: a deposit now with the balance collected later against the same booking, the manual UPI queue above, and a guest list that follows from the payment instead of being rebuilt from it.

Its own price is a monthly subscription rather than a cut of each ticket, so the fee per booking falls as you sell more instead of rising. Current plans are on pricing. Gateway charges stay separate and stay your gateway's.

More on the booking side of this in booking software for tour operators, and on getting a checkout onto a site you already own in do you need a website for your travel business.

Choosing in ten minutes

1. If you sell only to Indian travellers in rupees, take whichever of these your booking system already integrates with and move on. A 0.06% difference on a ₹2,000 booking is ₹1.18.
2. If you take foreign cards, compare on the international rate, where the spread is wider and the effective cost lands near 3.5%.
3. If your average ticket is under about ₹1,000, avoid a per-transaction fixed fee, which is where a flat percentage quietly wins.
4. Ask what the settlement cycle actually is on your account, in days, and whether a faster one costs extra. Cash flow hurts operators more than 0.2% does.
5. Once you clear a few lakh a month, ask every one of them for a rate against your real volume, and tell each what the others quoted.