RegOnline is part of the Cvent Event Cloud, a comprehensive software platform to help you plan, promote, manage and measure your meetings and events. It will be retired December 2019 and from April 2019 new customers will be onboarded to Cvent Event Management.
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Xola
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Xola, headquartered in San Francisco, provides cloud-based software designed to make it simple for businesses to manage reservations in real time from any channel—bookings made in-person, over the phone, through their company website, on Xola’s vendor mobile app, with local resellers, and online travel agents that are integrated with Xola.
RegOnline is a great tool for multi-track events. It is very user friendly and the software makes it easy to set up multiple tracks. It's even easy to check the progress of your event and make changes without impacting the registration process. The ability to collect data that can be taken back to the C-suite is also nice.
Xola is suited for small, medium, and large businesses that handle internet bookings, direct telephone bookings, and concierge/affiliate bookings. It tracks scheduling, payments, affiliate billing, can message customers through SMS or email, can hold notes on clients as any good CRM should, can be automated to do many features through the integration of apps.
RegOnline is able to handle credit card payments, cashing out once per month by sending a check to me (paid to the university) via mail. This was the main reason that we needed the site, and it is it's best feature.
Customizable options were added this year, and though a little confusing at first they have been great at adding additional details in headers on pages (on pages that I formerly was unable to provide additional instructions).
The registration system itself has been useful for managing registrants, and being able to easily update those who still chose to pay 'offline' via check or wire transfer (allowing me to still easily see all paid participants).
You can't easily access a registration unless you click on the edit pencil. It appears that the title of the event is linked but if you click on it you always get an error message. This appearance of being linked should be removed because it causes frustration. Same with the event number. It appears to be a link that can be opened but it goes to the same error message.
RegOnline did a big change about 18 months ago which wreaked havoc with registrations. A lot of functionality was lost and it took about a year for them to recover from that. At that time, our education and conferences department got so frustrated, we starting using another registration platform which was not a good experience either and then in early 2018 switched to Cvent.
Integrating the Viator / Trip Advisor API so that the encrypted customer emails can show up in Xola and the client may be emailed from inside Xola. Viator says that other platforms allow this but Xola is still lagging on this one.
Some minor tweaks allow the integrated tipping app to append a more customized message.
Really trying hard to find something else to say because Xola does everything really well.
The Department also uses RegFox for training events as well as conferences. One of the main reasons they use RegFox is because of the price, it only charges $0.99 per registration whereas RegOnline charges $3.55 per registration. Because we are a state agency, that can make a big difference to our budget. That being said it is easier to build multi-track events in RegOnline.
Xola has many similar features but in the end, the friendly fast 24/7 free always on and always ready to help customer support blows everyone else away. Many times I have found Xola to be able to expedite a customer issue or confusion with software integration or support for their software in a way that saves $$$ because my reservationists can resolve the issue or their confusion and quickly get back to work.
Everyone has been incredibly happy being able to pay on credit card! Prior to RegOnline, our only payment options were by check, money order, or wire transfer. I personally had to deposit many, many more personal checks to the university on behalf of participants. So participants have been happy with the credit card option (it was requested by many every year until the switch to RegOnline), but it also has been very helpful at saving me time as well.
The negative impact has been that we had a free registration page set up prior to RegOnline, that we dropped fully. So while some participants still pay by check or wire transfer, we still must pay the 'per participant' fee even for participants not paying through RegOnline.
