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.
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Zoho Bookings
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Zoho Bookings is an appointment scheduling software that helps individuals and teams across industries book meetings and services.
$8
per month per user
Pricing
Xola
Zoho Bookings
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Basic
$8
per month per user
Premium
$12
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Xola
Zoho Bookings
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Up to a 25% discount available for annual billing.
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.
I've tried some of the other online booking services and while there were good, they didn't have all of the features that Zoho Bookings does and since I'm already a Zoho One subscriber, it doesn't cost me anything more. I think virtually any type of business can use Bookings as it's not geared to a specific industry but can be customized for use in any type of industry. I would love to see salons use it as I think it can be truly a way for them to better book clients than using a paper calendar which I see many using. I also think massage therapists would also benefit but using Bookings. If you are a solopreneur or have a sales team, there's no way you can't benefit by using Bookings for your phone appointments, Zoom/Video meetings, or in-person meetings. There is also a resource function which allows you to block out conference rooms and other resources.
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.
It still needs more robust features and customization, like workflows and such. I'm confident they'll continue improving it, but some particular customization settings aren't available, in terms of triggers, content, look and feel, but it is mostly very detailed and particular. If you're ok with adapting to it, it is an excellent tool.
Some of the integrations and features are harder to set up. Once everything is set up its fairly straightforward, but if like ATI you have multiple branches or departments utilizing Bookings, you would need to set up separate booking sites for each office/salesperson
A lot of things are not great as this is a new tool, but they fix it relatively quickly. They don't have a direct phone number, but Zoho support has good service overall
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.
I found the integration with the two above is great if you're a Google Calendar user which we are not. While with Zoho Calendar we can have two way integration with Google Calendar there wasn't a need to do so. With Zoho Bookings which also integrates with Google Calendar we didn't have to worry about that as the integration with our Zoho Calendar was virtually automatic. There was also the cost consideration as the two above have a free version it was limited and didn't have all the bells and whistles we needed. Zoho Bookings provide us with everything from a single sign-on web browser and mobile app
