Choosing a payment gateway for a booking platform in India
Start a BNB business · September 28, 2026
UPI, split payouts, held settlements and refunds: what a marketplace needs from its payment gateway.
Taking payments for a single homestay is easy: share a UPI ID and you're done. Taking payments for a marketplace of many hosts is a different job. The money has to be collected from guests, held until the stay happens, split between you and the host, and refunded correctly when plans change.
What a booking marketplace needs from a payment gateway
- All the ways Indians pay: UPI, cards, net banking and wallets, with a smooth mobile checkout.
- Split payments: send the host's share to the host and keep your commission, automatically.
- Delayed or held settlement: release the host's money only after check-in, so you can handle cancellations and problems.
- Partial refunds: refund part of a booking under your cancellation policy.
- Host onboarding with KYC: collect bank details and verify hosts before paying them.
- Webhooks and reconciliation: so your platform knows the instant a payment succeeds, fails or is refunded.
The main options in India
Razorpay
Razorpay's Route product is built for marketplaces. It lets you split a customer payment between multiple sellers, onboard them as linked accounts, and control when each transfer settles, including putting a transfer on hold until your conditions are met (for example, until check-in).
Cashfree Payments
Cashfree offers a payment gateway and a split-settlement product for marketplaces, along with payouts to bank accounts and UPI. It is popular with platforms that make a lot of payouts.
PhonePe Payment Gateway
PhonePe's payment gateway brings the familiarity of India's most-used UPI app to checkout. Check which marketplace and split-settlement features are available for your business type before you choose it as your only gateway.
Products, pricing and eligibility change. Speak to each provider's sales team about your exact use case (a marketplace that holds funds until check-in) before you sign up.
Questions to ask every provider
- Do you support marketplaces that pay many third-party sellers?
- Can we hold a seller's share and release it on a date we choose?
- How are refunds handled after part of the money has gone to the seller?
- What KYC do our hosts need to complete, and can they do it online?
- What are the fees for UPI, cards and payouts?
- How quickly do settlements reach our account?
Don't build payments logic from scratch
The gateway moves the money, but your platform still has to decide how much goes where and when: commission, taxes, cleaning fees, coupons, partial refunds, damage deductions and payout schedules. That logic is where custom builds go wrong most often.
A ready-made platform has all of this built and tested, with a full payments ledger in the admin console. It takes less than ₹3 lakh to start your very own BNB platform. Request a free demo to see the checkout, refunds and payouts working end to end.