Build travel platform myself vs using wordpress

Hey amigos!!

I built a travel site for a small location using wp travel engine on WordPress. After few months now it's ranking on first page of Google.
I think it's due to pretty great integration of categories/tags and other pages with good internal linking on wptravel.
I also added 3 multilingual versions which was pretty easy in WordPress.

Now the problems:
1. Simple features like giving flexible dates of booking is locked behind premium option. Also, I can't change price for group bookings + cant use stripe or local payment of country.
2. Some things are just hard to understand. Like a list of tour page sometimes just doesn't load and even after lite speed cache and cdn its either slow or just doesn't load which increases my bounce rate.
3. I feel less in control especially with optimising performance.

Now I want to build one full travel platform where I want to list my tours all over the country in various cities. And I am not sure how easy it will be using that travel plugin to scale.
I am also looking for an option where tour operators can list their own tours and get their own dashboard.

For reference I am a NextJs dev with couple years experience. I think I can build it with a Cms ( payload maybe?) but not really sure how long it will take and how hard it will be.
I have build few apps by myself before but nowhere near this scale and never used a CMS.

So what would you guys suggest?
Built it on my own using nextjs + cms + supabase OR try using wptravelengine and pay for it? Or maybe some other solution?

Thanks in advance broskis

Also, which one is great for ease of SEO implementation?

WordPress is quicker to launch, but for scaling with custom features, building on Next.js with a CMS gives more control I think.

seo crazy said:

WordPress is quicker to launch, but for scaling with custom features, building on Next.js with a CMS gives more control I think.

Click to expand...

You are right I think.
What do you think if I launch a wordpress site with keyword name of city and launch them one by one?
Later when it's established I can create a branded company platform on nextjs.

Do you think its a good strategy SEO wise?
Because I got good ranking by buying exact keyword domain name for a city last time.

If you already know NextJS, building your own with a CMS like Payload + Supabase gives you way more flexibility long term, though it’ll take more time upfront than just scaling WP Travel Engine.