Small-Group Tour Booking

The operator sold small-group tours in India entirely by email and phone. Travellers came from the UK, the United States, Europe and Australia for tours through Rajasthan, Kerala and the Himalayan foothills.

Every enquiry led to an itinerary PDF and a bank transfer for the deposit. Seats were tracked in a spreadsheet, and the occasional double booking meant an awkward phone call. Balance payments were chased one email at a time, travel agents in several countries emailed to ask about availability, and passport copies, visa details and dietary needs arrived scattered across inboxes. Every few weeks, the ground team in India rebuilt rooming lists by hand from forwarded emails.

We spoke with the London office, the ground team in India, past travellers and partner agents before designing anything.

• Travellers compare departures, not tours. Once they like a tour, the question is which date, and how full it is.
• Currency is a trust issue. Travellers wanted to see a firm price in their own currency, not a conversion that might change.
• Solo travellers are a large share of small-group tours, and the single supplement or a room-share decided many bookings.
• The ground team in India needed the same facts, sooner: names, passports, rooms and diets, in time to confirm hotels.

Every tour on the platform lists its day-by-day itinerary, what’s included, and every upcoming departure with its price and seats left. Departures are marked as guaranteed once they reach the minimum number of travellers needed to run, and full departures offer a waitlist that notifies travellers if a seat opens.

Seat counts update the moment a booking is made, by a traveller or an agent, so a departure can no longer be double-booked.

Travellers book online and pay a deposit by card or PayPal. Each tour has its own price list in pounds, US dollars, euros and Australian dollars, so every traveller sees a fixed price in a currency they know.

The balance falls due a set number of days before departure. The platform sends reminders as the date approaches and takes the balance online, and the London office sees who has paid, who is due and who is late.

Solo travellers choose between their own room, with the single supplement, or sharing. Travellers who choose to share are matched with another solo traveller on the same departure, and the rooming list updates on its own.

Each traveller has a secure account to complete everything the trip needs before departure:

• passport details, with a check that the passport is valid long enough for the trip;
• guidance for India’s e-Visa and a place to record the visa once granted;
• travel insurance details and emergency contacts;
• dietary needs, medical notes and room preferences;
• the final itinerary and joining instructions, as a PDF.

Nothing is chased by email any more, and the account shows each traveller what is still missing.

Partner travel agents have their own portal. They check live availability, book seats for their clients at their agreed rates, see the commission on every booking, and download itineraries and invoices. Agents answer their own questions about dates and seats, and their bookings use the same live seat counts as everyone else’s.

For each departure, the platform produces the documents the ground team in India needs: rooming lists for every hotel, passenger manifests for guides and drivers, and a summary of dietary and medical notes. These update as bookings change, and the ground team downloads them directly instead of rebuilding them from emails.

The platform is a Laravel and MySQL application with a Vue.js booking flow, and Elasticsearch for searching tours by region, month and style. Stripe and PayPal take payments in four currencies, documents are stored on Amazon S3, and everything runs on AWS.

Passport details and other documents are encrypted and deleted after the tour. When the GDPR came into force in May 2018, we added consent records and the ability to export or delete a traveller’s data on request.

Existing bookings for the coming season were moved onto the platform first, so travellers and agents found their bookings waiting when they signed in. The platform then launched ahead of the next season’s sales, with agents invited to the portal one by one.

Travellers book and pay at any hour, from any time zone, in their own currency, and departures can no longer be double-booked. Balance payments arrive without chasing, solo travellers find a room-share easily, agents answer their own availability questions, and the ground team in India gets rooming lists and manifests without retyping a single name.