A travel marketplace has to coordinate two sides of the same trip: hosts who create and fulfil experiences, and travellers who search, book, pay and need support after checkout.
Who This Is Built For
Travel marketplace founders building a multi-sided product
Tour and activity businesses onboarding independent hosts
Teams launching web, iOS and Android booking experiences
Travel products that need host approvals, payouts, messaging and trip safety workflows
Project Overview
Tour Hoster is a travel marketplace for discovering India's hidden gems — handpicked tours, local guides, stays and experiences. The brand's philosophy says it all: 'Not for Tourists. Only for Travellers.' Stacknyu built the platform across web, iOS and Android on a single PocketBase backend, so travellers can search by location, dates, guests and budget, while hosts create packages across four categories — sightseeing, full packages, stays and guides — and manage bookings, wallets and payouts from a dedicated dashboard.
Challenges & Objectives
- Authentic Travel, at Scale
- Challenge: The platform needed to feel curated and authentic while supporting packages from many hosts and categories.
- Objective: Build a marketplace where hosts create packages across four categories — sightseeing, full packages, stays and guides — and travellers filter by location, dates, guests and budget.
- Cross-Platform Presence
- Challenge: Travellers discover and book on the go, so the experience had to work on web and mobile.
- Objective: Deliver a website plus native iOS and Android apps sharing one PocketBase backend and the same business logic.
- Host and Traveller Trust
- Challenge: A two-sided marketplace needs clear journeys and quality control for both hosts and travellers.
- Objective: Provide 'Become a Host' onboarding with admin approval, traveller tools like My Trips and Messages, and SOS emergency contacts for on-trip safety.
- Secure, Production-Grade Payments
- Challenge: Money flows between travellers, hosts and the platform on every booking.
- Objective: Razorpay checkout with HMAC-signed webhooks, server-side amount validation, per-booking invoices and host wallet payouts.
Our Approach
Marketplace Moat
The product's defensibility comes from the connected workflow, not from a listing page alone. Hosts can create packages and move them through approval, while travellers can discover, book, message and manage trips in the same system.
Payment verification, invoices, wallet earnings, UPI payout requests, package versioning, push notifications and SOS contacts make the marketplace usable after the first click. Those operational details are what turn a catalogue into a travel product.
- Marketplace Architecture
- We modelled hosts, packages, categories, package versions, orders, payments and chats in PocketBase, with Go services enforcing business rules and booking flows across web, iOS and Android.
- Secure Payments & Payouts
- A Razorpay-powered checkout handles advance and full payments, verified through HMAC-SHA256 webhooks. Hosts track earnings in a wallet and request UPI payouts; travellers receive an invoice for every transaction.
- AI-Assisted Package Creation
- Hosts generate complete itineraries with AI — from text descriptions or uploaded documents — then publish through an admin approval workflow with package versioning that keeps live listings consistent.
- Real-Time Communication
- In-app messaging with text and audio keeps hosts and travellers in sync, backed by Firebase Cloud Messaging push notifications on mobile.
- Cross-Platform Parity
- A SvelteKit web app and React Native apps for iOS and Android share one PocketBase backend, with deep links routing web package pages straight into the native apps.
Technologies Used
- Web: SvelteKit, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS.
- Mobile: React Native (Expo) for iOS and Android.
- Backend: PocketBase with Go services.
- Payments: Razorpay checkout, webhooks and invoice generation.
- Infrastructure: Cloudflare Pages, Firebase Cloud Messaging and Google Maps.
Outcome
Tour Hoster is live as a complete travel marketplace — on the web, in the Google Play Store for Android and in the Apple App Store for iOS — operated by SHARKBONE INDIA NETWORK PRIVATE LIMITED. Local hosts share their world and earn from their expertise, while travellers discover India's hidden gems with secure Razorpay bookings, instant confirmations, real-time chat and SOS support on every trip.
