Quest Travel Planning Platform

CTO and co-founder work building travel planning software for tour and travel companies in Uganda and East Africa

Overview

Quest is a Kampala, Uganda-based travel planning platform for tour and travel companies that I work on remotely from Seoul. I co-founded Quest as CTO and lead a 3-person engineering/product team building the platform: operator dashboards, admin tools, Uganda/East Africa destination data, travel requests, itinerary planning, accurate pricing, branded automated document generation, quote email delivery, reusable content libraries, billing, and release workflows.

Problem

Tour operators often prepare trips through spreadsheets, scattered destination/accommodation data, manual document editing, and repeated back-and-forth with travelers. Quest turns that workflow into structured software: shared travel data becomes reusable, requests become itineraries, pricing becomes traceable, and final plans become branded quotes, documents, emails, and marketing materials.

What I Built

  • Operator and admin workflows: travel requests, tourists, destination/accommodation/activity selection, itinerary planning, quote generation, analytics, billing, company settings, and role-aware access.
  • Travel-domain data model: destinations across Uganda/East Africa, activities, hotels/lodges, room rates, transport, entry fees, geography, company content, vehicles, staff, reviews, and per-company settings.
  • Quote economics: USD/UGX exchange-rate settings, live/manual rate refresh, transport fuel conversion, room pricing, service fees, and quote-level cost summaries.
  • Document and marketing outputs: branded A4 trip documents, travel quotes, page previews, edit overrides, Cloudflare R2 storage, Resend quote emails, merge tags, sender flows, and PDF attachments.
  • SaaS launch model: Free + Pro pricing, company-level Stripe subscriptions, full-access trials, billing settings, plan badges, and output-level gates for clean PDFs, email sending, and branding.

Stack

Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, PostgreSQL/Supabase, Drizzle ORM, NextAuth v5, Resend, Stripe, PostHog, Cloudflare R2, TypeScript/Express, Handlebars, Puppeteer, Docker, Hetzner, and Vercel.