Should You Build Your Own Taxi Booking System?

A weekend build on WordPress usually covers three things: a booking form, an email to the office when someone fills it in, and maybe a card payment button.

That is a real start, and plenty of operators have taken bookings that way for years. The form is not where the work is. The work is everything that has to happen after someone presses Submit, every night of the week.

BookTaxiService takes eligible card payments through the operator’s own Stripe account after setup. Card and saved-card features are on Starter, Growth and Scale.

• The money has to land in your account. BookTaxiService takes eligible card payments into your own Stripe account once you switch card payment on and add your Stripe keys.
• Regular customers do not want to type their card every time. Customers can choose a saved card when they book.
• Some trips should hold the card and charge after the ride. Eligible bookings can authorise a card and capture it later under your payment policy.
• Extras turn up after the booking. Staff can charge an eligible saved card or send the customer a payment link for the extra amount.
• Refunds come in full and in part. Staff can request a full or partial refund from the admin, up to the amount still refundable. Refunds are a staff decision, not automatic.
• Stripe sends the same event twice, or late. BookTaxiService checks each Stripe webhook’s signing secret, ignores duplicate events, retries failed ones and watches for events that went stale or failed.
• A new card over the phone is a separate case. Charging a new card for a phone booking needs MOTO (mail order and telephone order) enabled first.

Holds, capture timing and refunds all depend on where the payment is up to, which is why a DIY build has to track payment state, not only “paid” or “not paid”.

BookTaxiService charges a separate per-trip platform fee on completed trips, however the passenger pays. The amounts are on the pricing page, and the taxi card payments page covers the payment side in more detail.

BookTaxiService includes SMS on Starter and above, and each type of text is switched on by the operator. Out of the box, customer texts, driver assignment texts and driver offer texts are off.

• Customers want a confirmation and a reminder. BookTaxiService can send customer booking confirmations, reminders, and cancellation and rejection messages.
• Drivers need to know about a job. BookTaxiService can text drivers when they are assigned, when a job is offered and before a trip starts.
• Someone replies STOP. BookTaxiService checks that the reply really came from the SMS provider, records STOP and similar keywords, and checks that record before sending the next text. A START reply clears it.
• A sent text is not a read text. BookTaxiService records the booking emails and texts it queues, and a queued message is still not a delivered one. No delivery is guaranteed.

BookTaxiService tracks eligible flights on Growth and above, once the flight data provider is set up.

• Flights land early, late or not at all. BookTaxiService checks flight status and delay data for eligible airport bookings around the arrival time.
• Some changes need a person. Conflicts, trips already under way, large shifts and cancelled flights go to an attention list for staff.
• Moving the pickup on its own is a choice. Pickup auto-shift is optional and off by default. When you switch it on, it can move an eligible pickup after a material flight change.

A late flight does not guarantee an automatic pickup change or a new driver. More on airport work is on the airport transfer booking software page.

BookTaxiService limits repeated requests on the public parts of the system.

• A bot can submit a booking form again and again. Booking submissions are limited per IP address, and booking form sessions have their own limit.
• Login pages get guessed at. Sign-in and messaging routes have separate limits. BookTaxiService can ask for a Cloudflare Turnstile check after repeated admin or driver sign-in failures when it is configured.
• Some operators switch off code checks for quotes. In that case the booking form can use a Turnstile challenge for quote requests when the platform has it configured.
• Code texts are a target for people trying to run up an SMS bill. BookTaxiService caps how many code texts one phone number or one IP address can trigger in an hour and in a day.
• Staff accounts can see everything. Office staff sign in to their own accounts, and staff pages check each person’s role before they open.

These limits slow abuse down. They do not make it impossible, and no honest booking system claims they do.

BookTaxiService handles a set of small jobs that nobody lists in a quote until they go wrong.

• Daylight saving moves the clock twice a year. BookTaxiService uses your operator timezone and the pickup’s timezone for local pickup times and reminder dates, so your timezone setting has to be right.
• Customers want to see their own bookings. Signed-in customers can see their bookings and manage saved cards.
• More than one person runs the office. Staff pages need a sign-in and the right role, and Growth adds multiple admins.
• Fares are rarely one flat rate. Your fare rules drive the booking form price, and Growth adds advanced rules such as peak, hourly and dead-kilometre pricing. On Starter, the form takes quote requests by default.
• The booking form has to live on your website. BookTaxiService gives you an embeddable booking form for the site you already run. See the taxi booking form guide.

Building your own taxi booking system can be the right call for a large fleet with an in-house development team and needs that no off-the-shelf product covers, such as a tight link to systems only your business uses. In that case the list on this page is a useful scope document: every item on it is something your team will build, test and keep running, at night and on public holidays, for as long as the system is in use.

BookTaxiService is built in-house too. The difference is that the shared platform looks after most of this list for every operator at once, and each operator only sets up their own Stripe account and tracking IDs.

Premium Taxi Service is an Australian taxi operator in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane that has run on BookTaxiService since March 2026.

Read the Premium Taxi Service story.