Passenger app, operator portal, admin portal and website on one API — with seat holds that rule out double-booking, a visual bus-layout designer and a tracked refund queue.
The challenge
Bus travel is three businesses stitched together: the traveller who needs a seat they can trust, the independent operator who owns the buses and sets the fares, and the platform in the middle that verifies operators, takes a commission and handles refunds. Bookiee had the commercial idea and operator relationships, but no machinery to run it. The hard constraint: in travel, selling one seat twice isn't an apologetic refund — it's a passenger at a terminal at midnight holding a ticket that means nothing.
My role
Lead developer — architecture, API, passenger app, operator portal, admin portal and website
The approach
Designed one Express + PostgreSQL API behind an OpenAPI contract, with generated React Query hooks and Zod schemas, so the passenger app and both portals can never disagree about data shapes.
Made seat selection a claim, not a preference: chosen seats are held in Redis for a fixed window (10 minutes by default) and released automatically when a traveller walks away.
Built operators a visual bus-layout designer — two decks, sleeper berths, doors and stairs, premium seats with their own price and seats reserved for women — saved as reusable templates.
Treated Razorpay, not the phone, as the authority on payment: fares are computed on the server and a booking is confirmed only after the payment is verified; tickets arrive by SMS, email and push.
Turned cancellations into a tiered, tracked refund queue and gave staff composable role-based permissions with an audit trail.
Key engineering decisions
The decisions that made the difference — each one a trade-off chosen on purpose.
What shipped
iOS & Android (Expo): route search, live seat map, booking, tickets, cancellations and saved refund accounts.
Fleet, bus layouts, routes, trips, bookings, boarding and earnings for bus companies.
Operator approvals, refunds, settlements, commissions, campaigns and role-based staff access.
Two-deck, sleeper and seater layouts with per-seat pricing and women-reserved seats.
Razorpay with server-side verification; SMS, email and push tickets and alerts.
Public site for travellers and operator sign-ups.
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