HeliGo Nepal
Private helicopter charters to Everest, Annapurna and Mustang: request, quote, pay, fly.
Booking a private helicopter in Nepal usually means phoning operators one by one and comparing prices by hand. HeliGo takes one request and returns a fixed quote from a CAAN-certified operator within two hours.
The problem
Helicopter flights to Everest Base Camp, Annapurna, Langtang or Muktinath are sold through phone calls, agents and WhatsApp threads. Travellers cannot compare prices, and operators lose time answering requests that never turn into flights.
Behind every booking is real operational work: picking an aircraft, building a manifest, handling weather disruptions, refunds, and settling money between the platform and each operator.
What I built
HeliGo is a marketplace with three sides. Travellers request a charter by destination, date, passengers and trip type and receive one fixed price. Operators work in a partner portal with their documents and earnings. The HeliGo team runs dispatch, quotes, bookings and money from an admin console.
A separate AI planning assistant helps travellers who are not sure which flight they want: they describe their days in Nepal, their budget and their group, and it suggests routes before a person takes over.
What it does
For travellers
- Charter request with destination, date, passengers and trip type
- A fixed quote from CAAN-certified operators within two hours
- Destination guides for Lukla, Langtang, Gosaikunda, Muktinath, Annapurna Base Camp and Everest Base Camp
- Account area with trips and trip details
For operators
- Partner portal with document uploads
- Earnings and settlements
- An application flow to join the marketplace
For the HeliGo team
- Quote builder and dispatch
- Flight manifests and disruption handling
- Bookings, payments, refunds, receipts and commissions
- Activity log, roles and permissions
Planning assistant
- Conversational trip planning
- Runs as its own FastAPI service
- Hands the conversation to a person when the traveller is ready
How it's built
| Front end | React single-page app built with Vite, light and dark theme without a flash on load |
|---|---|
| API | Node and Express on its own subdomain |
| Data | PostgreSQL with Prisma |
| AI service | Python FastAPI, separate from the main API |
| Money | A ledger kept in paisa, the smallest unit of the rupee |
| Edge | Cloudflare, with nosniff, frame and referrer protections |
The public site and every dashboard are one React application talking to an Express API on its own subdomain. Admin, partner and customer areas are separate route groups, and permissions are checked on the server for every request.
The AI planning assistant runs as a separate FastAPI service. Keeping it apart means the booking system keeps working if the AI service is slow or down, and each can be deployed and scaled on its own.
Engineering highlights
A ledger that never loses a paisa
Every amount is stored as a whole number of paisa. Charter prices, commissions, refunds and settlements are added and split without floating-point rounding, so the operator's earnings and the platform's commission always add up to what the traveller paid.
Operations, built as software
Dispatch, flight manifests, disruptions and settlements are first-class screens in the admin console. A charter moves from request to quote, payment, dispatch and settlement with a record at each step in the activity log.
Search pages for every route
Each destination has its own indexable page, the sitemap and robots file are generated by a build script, and private areas such as the admin console, accounts and partner documents are blocked from crawling.
Screens
Where it stands
HeliGo Nepal is live at heligo.studionepal.com, with destination pages, charter requests and the planning assistant open to the public.
It is a full marketplace: three kinds of users, real money flowing between them, and the operational tools that keep flights running. That is the kind of software I enjoy building most.
Planning a product like HeliGo Nepal? I design, build and launch web apps for businesses in Nepal and abroad.