Crafts Travel Review: A Complete Tours & Travels Booking Platform

This is a detailed walkthrough of Crafts Travel, the tours and travels booking platform built by Crafts Software. In the interest of transparency: it's written by the team that built the product. We've tried to describe it plainly, including where it doesn't yet do everything, rather than only listing what sounds impressive.

What Crafts Travel is

Crafts Travel is a self-hosted booking website and admin back office for travel agencies, tour operators, visa service providers, car rental businesses and activity operators. It's built around your own products, not a global inventory of flights and hotels, which makes it a natural fit for businesses that design their own packages, process their own visas, rent their own or partnered cars, and run their own activities and excursions.

The customer website

Customers can browse tour packages by category, see detailed itineraries, and book online with traveller details and coupon codes. Visa services let customers choose a visa type, apply online, upload documents securely and track their application status. Car rentals check availability by date before confirming a booking, and activities enforce capacity limits on the server, so places can't be oversold. A multi-service cart lets customers combine a package, a car and an activity in one checkout.

Payment is taken through Stripe, Razorpay or PayPal, with a test mode for setup. After booking, customers get an automatic confirmation email, a PDF invoice and access to a dashboard where they can track every booking and visa application. The site also includes customer reviews with admin moderation, a wallet, a referral programme, a blog, custom pages, an FAQ section, newsletter subscription and a contact form. It's responsive on mobile and installable as a progressive web app, with an offline fallback page.

The admin back office

Bookings for tours, visas, cars and activities each have their own queue, moving through statuses such as pending, confirmed, paid, completed or cancelled, with full history. A Leads CRM captures enquiries and tracks them through pipeline stages with notes, and a quotation builder lets your team send itemised quotes that customers can accept or decline online, with a PDF version. Date-range and day-of-week pricing rules apply automatically at booking, and countries, cities, categories, pages, blog posts, FAQs and menus can all be managed without touching code.

Unlimited branches are supported, with each branch manager seeing only their own bookings and revenue and the owner seeing everything. Roles include Super Admin, Branch Manager, Staff and Customer, with a permissions editor to control access module by module. The dashboard shows key numbers, and a business insights page and booking reports, exportable to CSV, help track performance over time.

Finance

The finance module is one of Crafts Travel's stronger areas for a platform in this category. You can record the cost of each booking and see profit per booking and per service, rather than only revenue. A supplier directory tracks outstanding payables and supplier payments. A chart of accounts, manual journal entries and a transaction ledger, where entries can be voided or reassigned, keep the books organised. Tax settings are configurable, with a VAT report and profit and loss statement filterable by date range and exportable to CSV.

Notifications and documents

Email notifications work through your own SMTP configuration, with editable templates per stage and a test email feature. SMS and WhatsApp notifications work through webhooks to third-party providers you configure, also with editable templates and delivery logs. PDF documents are generated for booking invoices, visa applications and quotations, and a document verification page lets anyone confirm a document is genuine using its reference.

Security

Passwords and API tokens are hashed, not stored in plain text. Login and API requests are rate-limited against brute-force attempts, and password resets use secure, single-use tokens. Security headers are set on responses, and system directories that shouldn't be publicly accessible are protected. A REST API is available with its own bearer-token authentication, separate from the admin session.

Technology and installation

Crafts Travel is built in Core PHP 8 using an MVC structure, without a framework, which keeps the codebase lightweight and easy to host on standard shared or cloud hosting. It uses MySQL 8 or MariaDB 10.4+, PDO for database access, and Bootstrap 5 with vanilla JavaScript on the frontend. There's no build step requiring Composer or Node.js, which simplifies deployment. A web-based setup wizard handles installation: database connection, admin account and initial branding, without needing command-line access.

Our team installs Crafts Travel on your chosen hosting and sets it up with your branding, so you don't need technical staff to get started, even though the platform itself doesn't require a subscription or ongoing licence fee.

What Crafts Travel doesn't do yet

In fairness, some things aren't built in at this stage:

• No flight or hotel booking from global inventories. Crafts Travel sells your own packages, visas, cars and activities, not third-party flights or hotel rooms through a GDS.
• Permissions coverage is still being extended. The permissions editor covers the main modules, but not every action in every corner of the admin panel is yet gated by a specific permission; broader roles like Staff currently have wider access than a fully granular system would eventually allow.
• No native mobile app. The site works well as an installable PWA, but there's no separate iOS or Android app in app stores.
• No dedicated fleet maintenance tools. Car rental bookings and availability are handled well, but maintenance schedules and damage records aren't included.
• No connection to government or embassy visa systems. The visa module manages your side of the process; you still submit to the relevant authority through its own channels.

If your business specifically needs one of these, our team can discuss adding it as custom development, but it's honest to say it isn't there today.

A typical day using Crafts Travel

In the morning, the owner opens the dashboard and sees overnight bookings already confirmed and paid: two tour packages, a visa application and a car rental. The visa application moves into the processing queue, and the operations team prepares the tour bookings. A walk-in customer asks about a group trip, and a staff member builds an itemised quotation in minutes and sends the link, which the customer accepts from their phone that evening.

Through the day, activity bookings come in online, each checked against capacity automatically. At the branch level, a manager checks their own revenue dashboard, while the owner reviews profit across all branches after costs are recorded against the week's bookings. At month end, the finance team exports the profit and loss and VAT reports for the accountant, and the books are ready without anyone reconstructing figures from separate spreadsheets.

Who Crafts Travel is a good fit for

• Tour operators and travel agencies that sell their own packages and services rather than reselling global flight or hotel inventory.
• Businesses combining several services, such as tours, visas, car rentals and activities, that want them managed in one system instead of several disconnected tools.
• Agencies with, or planning, more than one branch that want centralized control with local visibility.
• Businesses that want to own their booking data and brand outright, without a recurring subscription.
• Owners who want real profit tracking per booking, not just revenue totals.

Who might want to look elsewhere

• Agencies whose core business is reselling flights and hotels from global distribution systems.
• Businesses that need a dedicated native mobile app immediately.
• Large car rental operations needing full fleet maintenance and telematics.
• Teams that want a system fully managed by a vendor with zero involvement in their own hosting, and no interest in the ownership trade-off, as discussed in our guide to self-hosted vs SaaS travel software.

Pricing

Crafts Travel is sold as a one-time purchase rather than a subscription. Your ongoing cost is hosting, which for a single agency is typically modest, plus any customization you choose to add. There's no per-user or per-branch fee. Our guide to subscription vs one-time purchase travel software walks through how this compares to subscription pricing over several years for a growing agency.

How it compares in practice

Against dedicated fleet or visa-only tools, Crafts Travel trades some depth in a single area for breadth across a whole travel business in one system. Against large SaaS travel platforms with global inventories, it trades access to third-party flights and hotels for full ownership of your own products, data and brand, and a materially lower cost over several years for most agencies. Which trade-off suits you depends mainly on whether your business sells its own products, as tour operators and DMCs typically do, or resells global inventory, which is closer to a traditional travel agent model.

Our honest summary

Crafts Travel brings tours, visas, car rentals and activities together with a genuinely capable finance module and multi-branch support, at a one-time cost rather than a subscription, installed on your own server under your own brand. It's a strong fit for tour operators, DMCs and multi-service travel businesses that want ownership and profit visibility. It's a weaker fit if your business model depends on reselling flights and hotels from a global inventory, or if you need fully granular permissions or fleet maintenance tools today. We'd rather you know that going in than find out after buying.