PoraShore — Travel Booking Platform

The build

Online travel in Bangladesh runs on three fragile things: the Facebook comment that turns into a booking nobody confirms, the advance that arrives after the seat is gone, and the partner settlement nobody can reconcile in the off-season. PoraShore is the platform those three built us — tour packages as real inventory (seats, dates, capacity), an advance-first checkout that only accepts a booking when money is in the rail, a traveller app that carries the pickup QR and guide contact for the 2 a.m. bus, and an operator console where manifests, cancellations and partner ledgers are just rows. It is the engine behind this studio's own travel-desk experiments, and it is offered to agencies the same way: your brand, your partners' money, our boring dependable plumbing.

What we handled

• Packages as inventory: per-departure seat counts, sold-out states, capacity per transport and room type
• Advance-first checkout: 30% via bKash/Nagad locks the seat; auto-refund when the agency cancels, ever
• Itinerary editor operators actually use: day rows, meal flags, inclusions that render identically on card and PDF voucher
• Manifest printing per departure with guide confirmations and hotel voucher status on one checklist
• Partner settlement ledger: expected-versus-received per departure, mismatches tinted, exports for the accountant
• Weather-hold and free-cancellation windows as first-class policy states — the monsoon is a feature, not an apology

Travel here is booked in comments, and cancelled in silence

The country's tour business runs on a page, a post, and a phone number: someone comments “ki khabo?” on an Eid package, an inbox fills with fifty enquiries, sixteen become “confirm”s over WhatsApp, six actually show up to pay the advance, and the agency buys bus seats for all sixteen while absorbing ten cancellations as the cost of doing lovely, chaotic business. Nothing about that is a people problem; it is a missing-instrument problem — nobody ever built the software layer where a booking is money-in-the-rail and a seat is counted, not vibes.

PoraShore starts from that floor. A package is a set of departures with real capacity per transport, room type and guide; an enquiry is not a booking until the 30% advance lands through bKash or Nagad; a cancellation inside the policy window refunds itself without a single awkward conversation. The rest of the product — the traveller app, the manifest printer, the settlement ledger — exists to make the week that follows the booking as boring as the checkout was rigorous.

The checkout is the business model

Advance-first is the whole trick: the seat inventory only decrements when payment intent converts, and the split — ৳4,644 now against ৳10,836 before departure — is stated on the card with the same arithmetic the ledger will use later. Coupons carry their savings into every downstream view, traveller NIDs attach to the manifest line, and the free-cancellation window renders as a countdown, not fine print. Agencies we shadowed asked for one more “simple booking form” feature we refused to build: a booking without money is exactly the liability they pay for every season.

The checkout ships in two themes — light and dark, designed together, not filtered — because this country books trips at midnight from bed more often than at a desk at noon. The same state machine backs both, so a booking that starts on a phone at 1 a.m. finishes identically on the office laptop at nine.

The trip lives on the traveller's phone

After confirmation the app takes over the work the WhatsApp thread used to do badly: a pickup QR with the point and time that the bus assistant can scan in daylight or at 2 a.m., the money line (paid, due, refunded) visible to both sides, the guide's number one tap from a WhatsApp chat, and a pack list that actually reduces on-trip support calls — because half of package support is somebody's forgotten raincoat. Itinerary day-rows render from the same source as the voucher PDF, so what the page promised is structurally what the traveller holds.

It is a PWA by principle: installable, offline-readable for tickets, and free of store review delays when a season's policy changes mid-week. The traveller surface must never be the reason an agency cannot update a pickup point at dawn.

The operator desk: manifests, settlements, monsoons

The kanban is the agency's real day — New, Advance paid, Manifest ready, Departing, Completed — with per-departure checklists where guide confirmations and hotel voucher sends are gates, not hopes. The manifest printer produces the document the bus assistant actually collects on: names, NIDs, room splits, due balances. Every partner who carries a slice of the package — hotel, transport, boat — gets a settlement view showing expected against received per departure, mismatches tinted amber, exports ready for the accountant's Monday.

Weather is modelled, not excused: routes carry a watch state, and a forecast trigger converts held departures into policy-defined options — reschedule with seat priority, refund without argument, partial credit — all of it recorded as normal rows in the same ledger. Monsoon cancellations stop being a crisis when the software has always treated them as a state.

Our own travel brand rides this stack

This blueprint is unusual here in one honest way: it is not only a product we would deploy for agencies, it is infrastructure our own travel operations are being built on — the public brand and its domain land on this engine, and when this page links to it, that link will be a first-party deployment, not a testimonial. Until that day, the copy says what is true: the platform runs internal operations, the agency pilot is the offer, and nobody is quoting growth numbers that do not exist yet.

For agencies the deal mirrors every blueprint here: your brand, your merchant accounts, your partner agreements; our licence is flat and your data exports in documented formats. Travel platforms that take commission on your own tours are selling you a cage with a nice view — we would rather be the plumbing you never resent.