Travel Website Development in India: Cost & Features (2026)

Travel website development in India costs from ₹15,000 for a WordPress travel agency website, or from ₹25,000 with a custom design, at Codingclave, and our fixed website packages are ₹15,000, ₹40,000 and ₹75,000. Booking portals with flight and hotel APIs, and tour package sites with their own booking engine, are custom software and start from ₹2,00,000, at a fixed price once the scope is agreed. Prices checked on 2026-10-19.

I'm Ashish Sharma. I founded Codingclave in Lucknow in 2017, and the team has delivered 200+ projects worldwide since then. We are rated 4.9 on Google from 92 reviews and 5.0 from 37 Upwork reviews.

We build travel agency and tour package websites through our website development services, and travel portals with flight and hotel APIs as custom software: the search, the booking engine, the payments and the supplier integration behind them. This guide covers what each type of travel website needs, what it costs, how flight and hotel booking engines connect to suppliers in India, which payment and GST rules change the build, and how to pick a travel website development company without getting burnt.

One number to keep in mind while you read: Phocuswright's India Travel Market Essentials report, summarised by Travel Extra on 27 September 2026, forecasts the Indian travel market to grow 13 percent to $47.2 billion in 2026, and says online bookings rose in 2025 while offline fell, taking online's share to 57 percent. If your agency still takes bookings only on the phone, that 57 percent is going to someone else.

Travel website development cost in India (by type)

Here is the cost table I share before we talk scope. The prices are Codingclave's own; third-party fees are separate. Ask us, as you would any vendor, whether a quote includes GST. The timelines are typical ranges, not promises; you get a written timeline with your quote. Prices checked on 2026-10-19.

The three fixed packages and what each includes are on our website packages page, and the features travel agencies ask for most are summarised on our travel agency website page. For hotels and resorts, the booking site usually pairs with our hotel management software, and the wider hospitality work is on the hospitality industry page.

Running costs that are not in the development quote

These are the third-party fees people most often forget to budget. Checked on 19 October 2026.

What moves the price up or down

• Booking engine or inquiry form. The single biggest fork. An inquiry form is typically a day of work. A booking engine with seat inventory, holds, partial payments and refunds is typically six to eight weeks, and it moves the build from a website package to custom software.
• Third-party integrations. Each flight API, hotel API or channel manager typically adds two to six weeks, mostly the supplier's certification and edge cases.
• Custom design versus template. WordPress builds start from ₹15,000 and custom designs from ₹25,000. A custom design is worth it for inbound and luxury travel; a domestic budget agency can start on a well-chosen theme.
• Languages. Each extra language is quoted separately, because it depends on how many pages you have and who translates them.
• Admin complexity. A B2B agent portal with net rates, credit limits and commission statements is a second product inside your website.

For a comparison with other kinds of sites, see how much a website costs in India in 2026.

Planning a travel website or a booking portal? WhatsApp Ashish on +91 92771 84741 with what you sell (packages, fixed departures, or flights and hotels) and who books (travellers or sub-agents). We reply within 2 hours (Mon–Sat 10:00–19:00 IST) and send a free quote within 24 hours.

Booking engines: flight and hotel API integration for travel portals

If you searched for travel website development hoping to sell flights and hotels online, this is the section you need. It covers where the flight and hotel content comes from, what getting access involves, and what a portal costs. The suppliers named below are market options, not a list of our past integrations; we choose the supplier with you during scoping, once you know which one will give you an agency account.

Do you need a booking engine or an inquiry website?

Prices checked on 2026-10-19.

Who supplies flight and hotel content in India

Channel managers such as eZee, STAAH and Djubo are a different tool: they sync one hotel's own rooms with the OTAs. They do not give you other hotels to sell.

Three routes: white-label, aggregator API, or direct GDS

1. White-label portal. You rent a ready-made portal with supplier content already connected. As one published example, Adivaha's Startup plan lists ₹79,000 one-time setup plus ₹6,900 a month in India, says it charges no booking fees, and supplies hotels and flights through its own APIs. That is ₹1,61,800 in the first year before any tax (Adivaha pricing, checked 19 October 2026). It is the fastest way to go live. Before you sign, ask who owns the customer data, whether you can plug in your own supplier contracts, and what you keep if you leave.
2. Custom portal on an Indian B2B aggregator API. You open an agency account with an aggregator such as TBO or TripJack and get test credentials, and we build your own search, booking and admin on top. You own the code and the design, and you can add a second supplier later. For most Indian agencies starting to sell online, this is the route I would price first.
3. Direct GDS. A contract with Amadeus, Travelport (through ITQ in India) or Sabre gives you the widest flight content, but expect a sales process, a contract and a certification stage. Issuing tickets yourself also means IATA accreditation, and for India IATA lists a financial guarantee and financial statements among its requirements (IATA India requirements, checked 19 October 2026). IATA is not mandatory to run a travel agency (ClearTax); agencies without it sell flights through a consolidator or aggregator that issues the ticket.

How a booking engine works

Whichever supplier you choose, the flow on your site is the same five steps:

1. Search. The customer's dates and route go to the supplier API, and fares or room rates come back. Short caching keeps the site fast without showing stale prices for long.
2. Recheck the price before payment. Fares and room rates change between search and checkout. The engine re-prices the chosen option and shows the customer any change before taking money.
3. Hold. Where the supplier allows a hold, the seat or room is blocked and a timer shows on the checkout page.
4. Pay. The customer pays on the gateway's hosted or embedded checkout, and a webhook marks the booking paid even if the browser closes.
5. Ticket or voucher. The engine confirms with the supplier and sends the e-ticket or hotel voucher by email and WhatsApp.

Most of the build effort goes into what happens when something fails:

• Payment taken, ticket failed. Decide the rule in advance: retry, offer an alternative, or refund automatically through the gateway, and alert your team either way.
• Paying your supplier. Ask each supplier how you pay them: a prepaid deposit, a credit limit, or a payment per booking. The portal then needs a daily report that matches supplier bookings with customer payments, so your deposit does not run dry in the middle of a sale.
• Markups. Set by supplier, route, hotel city or agent, with a floor so a mistyped markup cannot sell below cost.
• Cancellations and changes. Check which ones the API supports and which need an offline request to the supplier, and show the cancellation charge before the customer confirms.
• Invoices. One booking can carry different GST treatment on different lines (your service fee, the hotel, a tour package), covered below.

For API work in general, see our guide to API integration services in India. If you would rather buy ready-made software than build, compare the options in our tour operator software guide.

What a travel booking portal costs

• Our price. A custom flight and hotel booking portal, B2C or B2B, starts from ₹2,00,000. The price is fixed once the scope is agreed in writing and is paid 40/40/20. The code and IP are yours on final payment, and every build includes 6 months of free bug fixes.
• What raises it. More suppliers, a B2B agent layer (wallet, credit limits, a markup per agent), multi-currency, and a mobile app. Simple mobile apps start from ₹50,000; a booking app is priced on its features.
• What sits on top. The supplier's fees (quoted by the supplier), Razorpay's 2% per domestic payment plus 18% GST on that fee, hosting, and WhatsApp or SMS messages.
• Market references. A white-label portal such as Adivaha's Startup plan costs about ₹1,61,800 in its first year (₹79,000 setup plus ₹6,900 a month), and you keep renting after that. At the other end, ColorWhistle, an Indian agency, estimates ₹14,50,000 to ₹21,00,000 for a travel agency website and says builds with advanced APIs cost more; the same page also lists a ₹1,60,000 one-time website package. Its page carries no date (ColorWhistle, checked 19 October 2026).

Prices checked on 2026-10-19.

Want a booking portal with flight and hotel APIs? Send Ashish the details on WhatsApp: the supplier you have or are talking to, and whether travellers or sub-agents will book. We reply within 2 hours (Mon–Sat 10:00–19:00 IST) and send a free quote within 24 hours.

Payments and PCI DSS on a booking portal

• Never store card numbers. Since 1 October 2022, RBI's card-on-file rules (RBI/2022-2023/95, dated 28 July 2022) allow only card issuers and card networks to store card-on-file data (RBI notification). Your portal should use the gateway's hosted or embedded checkout, and its tokenisation for saved cards.
• Keep your PCI DSS scope small. When the whole payment page or form comes from a PCI DSS compliant provider, by redirect or an embedded iframe, merchants can usually self-assess with SAQ A, the shortest questionnaire. Since 1 April 2025, sites that embed the payment form in an iframe must also confirm their pages are protected against malicious scripts, with their own controls or with confirmation from the payment provider (PCI SSC, 28 February 2025). Confirm with your acquirer which questionnaire applies to you.
• Gateway costs. Razorpay charges 2% per successful domestic transaction and up to 3% on international cards, with ₹0 setup and ₹0 annual fee, plus 18% GST on the fee. We set it up through our Razorpay integration service, and I compare the main gateways in Razorpay vs Stripe vs PayU vs Cashfree.
• Refunds. Refunds go back to the original payment method through the gateway's API, triggered by your cancellation rules, not by hand.

GST and TCS on what your portal sells

Tax decides how your booking and invoice screens are built, so settle it with your CA before the build starts. These rates were checked on 19 October 2026; check with your CA for your own case.

• Tour packages. Tour operator services carry 5% GST without input tax credit when the invoice shows the gross package price (GST Council rate schedule, item 10), or 18% with input tax credit (ClearTax).
• Hotel rooms. Rooms priced up to ₹7,500 a day carry 5% GST without input tax credit from 22 September 2025, under Notification 15/2025-Central Tax (Rate) (TaxGuru summary, 9 June 2026); rooms above that stay at 18% with credit. The 57th GST Council meeting on 8 October 2026 recommended allowing limited input tax credit on these rooms (Taxscan), which applies only once it is notified.
• Flight tickets. An agent's commission or service fee on air tickets carries 18% GST under SAC 998551 (ClearTax).
• Overseas tour packages. From 1 April 2026, the seller collects TCS at a flat 2% of the package price under section 394(1) of the Income-tax Act, 2025, replacing the earlier 5% and 20% slabs (TDSMAN, 10 September 2026; Budget 2026 report, 1 February 2026). Some older pages still show the old slabs.
• Marketplace portals. If other suppliers sell through your portal, GST treats you as an e-commerce operator, and you collect TCS of 0.5% in total on their net sales. The central half is 0.25% under Notification 15/2024-Central Tax, dated 10 July 2024. If owners who are not GST-registered list rooms on your portal, also ask your CA whether the portal itself must pay the GST on those rooms under section 9(5) of the CGST Act.

What this means for the build: tax worked out per invoice line with the right SAC code, a GST invoice generated at payment, the customer's PAN and a TCS line on overseas packages, and reports your CA can file from. Our GST-compliant software guide covers invoicing in more detail.

Tourism website development: five types and what each needs

"Tourism website" covers very different businesses. Here is how I separate them when scoping.

1. Travel agency website

For agents who sell packages and customise itineraries over a call or WhatsApp. The website's job is to earn the inquiry, not to take the payment.

Must have: package pages with day-wise itineraries, inclusions and exclusions, inquiry forms that capture dates, travellers and budget, one-click WhatsApp with the package name pre-filled, destination guides for Google traffic, reviews with photos.

2. Tour operator platform

For operators who run their own departures and need to manage seats, guides and vehicles.

Must have: departure calendar with seat inventory, online booking with partial payment, group bookings, guide and vehicle assignment, pickup points, pre-trip documents and post-trip review requests.

3. OTA (online travel aggregator)

A marketplace selling other people's flights, hotels and activities.

Must have: flight and hotel search through a B2B API or GDS, price comparison, multi-vendor booking and settlement, wallet and refunds to wallet, reviews, loyalty points, a fraud check on card payments. The supplier options are in the booking engine section.

4. Destination or tourism board website

For state tourism departments and destination marketing bodies.

Must have: attraction and event listings with maps, itinerary suggestions by trip length, multi-language content, large media galleries served through a CDN, accessibility compliance (GIGW guidelines for Indian government sites), and a content workflow for a non-technical team.

5. Hotel, resort or homestay booking website

For single properties and small chains that want direct bookings instead of paying OTA commissions.

Must have: room-level availability, a booking engine that holds the room for a few minutes during payment, channel manager sync so OTA and direct inventory match, gallery, reviews, and a rate plan structure (refundable, non-refundable, breakfast included).

Travel agency website development: the features that bring bookings

This is the feature list I use for the first two rows of the cost table. Not everything applies to everyone; I have marked what to skip if budget is tight.

Package and itinerary pages

• Day-wise itinerary with hotel names, meals and transfers per day. Travellers compare this line by line against competitors.
• Inclusions and exclusions in two clear columns, so the customer does not have to call to ask what is not included.
• Price with the basis stated: per person on twin sharing, per couple, per group. Ambiguous pricing kills trust.
• Seasonal prices so the Diwali departure shows a different price from the monsoon one without staff editing pages.
• Photos and short videos per package, served as WebP through a CDN so pages load in under 2.5 seconds on a 4G phone.

Inquiry and booking

• Inquiry form per package with travel dates, number of travellers and budget. The form should email your team and open a WhatsApp conversation.
• WhatsApp click-to-chat with context. The message opens pre-filled with the package name and dates. We can route these through PayPerWA, our WhatsApp product, when you want automated follow-ups.
• Online booking (optional at this tier). If you add it, add partial payment: a small advance is a far easier first step for a customer than the full ₹60,000 up front.
• Instant confirmation by email and WhatsApp, with the itinerary PDF attached.

Trust and content

• Reviews with the traveller's photo from the trip, not a stock image.
• Destination guides: things to do, best time to visit, how to reach. These rank for informational searches and feed people into package pages.
• Certifications: IATA, TAAI, IATO or state tourism registration numbers visible in the footer.
• Blog only if someone will write for it. An abandoned blog with three posts from 2023 hurts more than no blog.

Admin and operations

• Package editor with drag-and-drop day ordering.
• Inquiry inbox with status (new, quoted, booked, lost) so you can see your conversion rate.
• Simple CRM with the traveller's history; skip a full CRM until you have more than 50 inquiries a month.
• Invoice generator with GST and SAC codes.

Tour package website development: booking engine, payments, itinerary builder

This is the third row of the cost table and the one most often under-scoped. A tour package website is a travel agency website plus three systems that have to agree with each other.

The booking engine

The engine owns inventory. For each departure it tracks total seats, booked seats, held seats (a customer is mid-payment) and cancelled seats. The rules I insist on:

• A hold expires in 10 to 15 minutes and releases the seat automatically. Without this you oversell on a busy day.
• Partial payment with a due date. Advance now, balance 30 days before departure, with automated WhatsApp and email reminders.
• Cancellation policy as data, not a paragraph. Percent refunded by days before departure, so the system calculates the refund and nobody argues.
• Group bookings with one lead traveller paying and other travellers filling their own details later.
• Child and infant pricing as separate fare types.

Payments

Razorpay is our default for Indian businesses (its fees are in the running-costs table above), and it covers UPI, cards, net banking, wallets and EMI. PayU and Cashfree are close alternatives, and Stripe is the option for inbound tours paid from abroad. Build in:

• Payment links for quotes closed over the phone, so the same system records them.
• The refund, webhook and GST-invoice rules from the payments section above, with the SAC code for tour operator services on the invoice.

The itinerary builder

This is what separates a tour package portal from a booking site. The builder lets your team, or the customer, assemble a trip from components: destinations, nights per destination, hotel category, transfers, activities. Each component has a cost and a markup, so the quote re-prices live.

Three design decisions I would push you on:

1. Start with an internal builder for your sales team, not a public one. Customers rarely finish a 12-step builder, but your staff can send a priced PDF in minutes instead of building it by hand.
2. Keep hotel and activity costs in a supplier rate table with validity dates, so seasonal re-pricing is a spreadsheet upload, not a developer ticket.
3. Version the quote. When a customer asks for a cheaper hotel on day 3, keep version 1 and send version 2. You will need the history.

Agent (B2B) portal

If you sell through sub-agents, add a login with net rates, a credit limit, markup control and a monthly commission statement. It is quoted as part of the custom build, and it earns its keep the first time it settles a dispute about commission.

Travel website developer stack: what we build with and why

The honest trade-off: WordPress gets a travel agency online from ₹15,000 and your team already knows how to use it, but once you need seat inventory and payment webhooks, a custom Next.js or Laravel build is cheaper to maintain than a pile of booking plugins.

Integrations: GDS, B2B flight APIs, channel managers, payments, WhatsApp

Flights and hotels you resell

• Flight and hotel suppliers. B2B aggregators such as TBO and TripJack, bed banks such as Hotelbeds, or a GDS under contract. The options, how access works and what it costs are in the booking engine section above.
• Launch with one supplier. A second supplier is far easier to add once the first is certified and your booking, refund and reconciliation flows work.

Hotel inventory you own

• Channel managers (eZee, STAAH, Djubo and others) sync your rooms between your website and MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, Booking.com and Agoda, so a room sold on one shows as sold everywhere. I cover the options and prices in the hotel channel manager guide.

Payments

• Razorpay for domestic (UPI, cards, net banking, EMI), Stripe for inbound customers paying in dollars or euros, and a currency display switch on the front end for international visitors.

Communication

• WhatsApp Business API through Meta's Cloud API for booking confirmations, payment reminders, pre-trip documents and post-trip review requests. Utility templates cost about ₹0.115 per message on Meta's India rate card, before 18% GST, and Meta does not charge for a utility template sent inside an open 24-hour customer service window (Meta pricing, checked 19 October 2026). A made-up example, not a client case study: a booking that gets five utility messages (confirmation, payment reminder, documents, departure reminder, review request) costs up to about ₹1.68 through PayPerWA, which is 5 × (₹0.115 plus 18% GST, plus PayPerWA's ₹0.20 including GST). It costs less when some of those messages go inside an open window, where only PayPerWA's ₹0.20 applies. Prices checked on 2026-10-19.
• SMS for OTP and as a fallback when WhatsApp delivery fails.
• Email for the itinerary PDF and invoices.

Maps

• Google Maps or Mapbox for itinerary maps, hotel locations and pickup points. Budget for the API usage once you pass the free tier.

How to build a travel website: step by step

This is the order I would follow, whether we build it or someone else does.

1. Choose the model. An inquiry website for customised packages, a booking engine for fixed departures, or a portal for flights and hotels. The booking engine or inquiry table above helps you decide.
2. Register the business and GST, and decide how you will issue tickets. Your company or proprietorship, GST registration, state tourism registration where it applies, and for flights, IATA accreditation or a consolidator.
3. Choose your supplier and get test credentials. Open an agency account with the aggregator or bed bank, get the API documentation and test access, and get the fee terms in writing.
4. Write the scope. Pages, booking rules, cancellation policy, payment gateway, languages, who writes the content and who supplies photos. A fixed price is only as good as this document.
5. Design and build. Package or search pages first, then booking, payments, admin and invoices.
6. Get certified by the supplier. Suppliers such as Hotelbeds move you through a certification environment before live access; ask yours what its certification involves and plan the time for it.
7. Go live on the payment gateway and confirm your SAQ. Finish the gateway's KYC, switch from test keys to live keys, and confirm your PCI DSS questionnaire with the acquirer.
8. Launch, then market. Destination and package pages for Google, a WhatsApp follow-up sequence for inquiries, and reviews from your first travellers.

If you are starting the business itself, our guide on how to start a tour operator business in India covers registration and licences in more detail.

Web development for the travel industry: SEO that brings bookings

Paid clicks stop when the budget stops, so organic search is where a travel website pays for itself over time. What works in 2026:

Pages to build

One page per destination and one per package, each with unique text. A hundred packages sharing one template paragraph will not rank.

Technical points that matter for travel sites

• Speed. Image-heavy pages need WebP, lazy loading and a CDN. Aim for Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds on mobile.
• Schema markup. TouristTrip and Offer markup describe your packages to search engines, but Google's search gallery has no rich result for tour packages, and Google stopped showing FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026 (Google Search Central, checked 19 October 2026). Add Organization, LocalBusiness and BreadcrumbList markup, and keep prices and dates in visible text.
• Internal links from guides to packages and back. Guides earn the traffic; packages earn the money.
• Hindi or regional pages if your customers search in Hindi. These searches have far less competition.

Our SEO for small business guide covers the basics that apply to every site, and our guide to digital marketing for travel agencies covers ads, social and WhatsApp for travel; the destination page structure above is what is specific to travel.

How to choose a travel website development company

I am a vendor, so read this with that in mind.

1. Complete a test booking. Not a screenshot or a video. Ask for a working booking flow in test mode: pick a package or a fare, pay a test amount, cancel it, and see whether the refund and the emails behave. If they cannot show you one, ask what they can show you for your scope instead.
2. Ask which integrations are in scope, and who handles certification. Razorpay is table stakes. A channel manager, a B2B flight or hotel API, and a WhatsApp template flow are the ones that separate a travel website development company from a general web agency. Ask who will deal with the supplier's certification team.
3. Get the scope in writing before the price. Number of pages, whether booking is included, which payment gateway, how many languages, who writes the content, who supplies photos. Two quotes on the same written scope are comparable; two quotes on a one-line brief are not.
4. Ask who owns the code, the domain and the hosting account. You should, from day one. Walk away from anyone who keeps the domain in their name.
5. Ask what happens after launch. A maintenance price, a response time for bugs, and how a price change on 40 packages gets done (your admin panel, or a developer ticket).
6. Check the reviews. Read a vendor's Google reviews, not only the ones on its own site; ours are rated 4.9 from 92 reviews. We don't name travel clients on this page, so ask any vendor you shortlist what they can show you for your scope.
7. Be suspicious of a ₹15,000 quote for a booking engine. At that price you get a website with an inquiry form, like our own ₹15,000 Starter package. That is fine if it is what you need, but it should be described as such, not relabelled as "booking".

Seven mistakes I keep seeing in travel website development

1. Unoptimised images. A 4 MB hero photo on a 4G connection loses the visitor before the price loads. WebP and a CDN fix this for almost nothing.
2. A booking flow with eight steps. Every extra step loses a share of buyers. Collect the lead traveller's details, take the advance, and get the rest later.
3. No partial payment. Asking for ₹80,000 up front on a first visit does not work. Take an advance.
4. No trust signals. Reviews with real photos, IATA or TAAI membership, and a GST number in the footer. Travel is a high-value purchase from a stranger.
5. Prices that never change. Seasonal pricing has to live in the admin panel, or your Diwali departures will be under-priced for three years.
6. No follow-up system. Most inquiries do not book on the first contact. Route inquiries into a CRM or at least a WhatsApp follow-up sequence.
7. Building the app first. The website brings the Google traffic; the app serves repeat customers. Build them in that order.

Talk to us about your travel website

We are Codingclave, a founder-led development company in Lucknow (280/10A, Vrindavan Colony). I started it in 2017, and we have delivered 200+ projects worldwide since then. We are rated 4.9 on Google from 92 reviews and 5.0 from 37 Upwork reviews.

Send me your package list, or the flight or hotel supplier you want to connect, and a link to your current site. We reply within 2 hours (Mon–Sat 10:00–19:00 IST) and send a free quote within 24 hours, at a fixed price once the scope is agreed. Our terms: 40/40/20 payments, the code and IP are yours on final payment, and 6 months of free bug fixes.

• WhatsApp: +91 92771 84741
• Call: +91 92771 84741
• Get a free quote with your requirements
• Website packages from ₹15,000
• Website development services
• Custom software for booking portals, from ₹2,00,000
• Travel agency website
• Hospitality software and websites
• See our work