Xola

Avantages

I loved everything about the Xola reservation system. It made things easy and was not complicated to use.

Inconvénients

There is nothing to speak on as a con about Xola.

Avantages

Out of the three booking software platforms we currently use, Xola is my favorite.

There are many pros to Xola, but let me summarize by saying it is the combination of good-to-great design along with five-star customer service.

Inconvénients

The uncertainty regarding subscription packages. We have a "Premium" subscription that is a flat rate, which serves our needs very well.

If we do not have option to continue this package in 2020, we will have to switch to another booking software platform. Which would be a shame because Xola is my preferred booking software.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Xola

Avantages

Very disappointing, horrible customer service and support.

Inconvénients

Very disappointing, horrible customer service and support.

Avantages

Very forward thinking company . Love the need updates and the easy access to customer service

Inconvénients

Sometimes when business is slow it can be a bit financially but no really cons for a monthly transaction

Avantages

Ease of use, we have been using this for some time now and have a great understanding of how to use the tool and get a lot of value from it. It has some great integrations, great text, email reminders for our guests and xola has invested in a lot of great improvements over the past 2 years that made our business better.

Inconvénients

Lack of POS integration, our business is moving to sell more onsite with our guests, pre gratuity is huge in our space and XOLA lacks features for pre gratuity except to do an ADD on which auto charges taxes and the booking fee on gratuity. reporting is still lacking, and dashboards, for performance, are also lacking.

Avantages

XOLA has incredible flexibility when compare to other escape room booking software I've compared it to in the 2+ years I've used it. I have comparison shopped all the other booking software out there and haven't found anything that compares to what you can do with XOLA. From the visual presentation to the customer, to creating coupons and discounts, to arranging pricing and schedules for rooms. Nothing comes close. XOLA is PACKED with integrations with other software and gives you access to data from your bookings that I haven't found anywhere else.

Inconvénients

I will admit I'm not a fan of the 6% booking fee passed on to my customers. Our bookings actually increased when we implemented it, and it does give me access to all of XOLA's features. Yes, Americans are conditioned to tacked on taxes, fees and other charges for online transactions, but that doesn't mean I have to like passing on cost to my customers.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Xola

Avantages

First thing I like is the willingness to listen to the customers for new changes and ideas. That makes both of us better. The support is always there to help.

Inconvénients

Unable to quickly block of certain tours at specific times.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Xola

Avantages

I love this software I use it every day for my Escape Room. It does everything I need all in one place to me it is exactly what I need for my booking software for escaperooms

Inconvénients

nothing least about it but one thing is the ability to stop negative reviews from being posted that's the only thing everything else I love it.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Xola 

Logiciel antérieur 

Pourquoi passer à Xola

Avantages

This is a product that is gorgeous and accessible on the front end, and powerful on the back end. The onsite booking is aesthetic and easy for our customers, and the back end is incredibly user friendly for my staff to use, and chock-full of useful resources. It is clear that the people behind Xola had both design and functionality in mind when creating this software, and it really shows! Moreover, their customer service is phenomenal - very quick, responsive, and helpful.

Cannot recommend it enough! Out of the many software services we use as a business, Xola is the one we are most impressed by.

Inconvénients

The pricing model seems to be changing soon, to one where the cost may be passed on to customers. We will enjoy extra savings, but we are not entirely sold on whether we want to do this. There used to be several pricing models, but it looks like this will be the only one.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Xola

Avantages

When it comes to ticketing, Xola offers great features
It makes online booking easy and has great calendar management features
Has also worked well for scheduling.

Inconvénients

No bad experience as Xola has the features we need.

Avantages

The support is great. Every time I have needed help I was able to live chat with someone.

Inconvénients

The calendar display for my customers is not as user friendly as some of the other programs I have seen.

Avantages

This is the most user friendly software I have ever used for escape room management! You can easily adjust bookings, search guests, and see how your business is doing at a glance! My favorite thing: Live chat support!!

Inconvénients

I said this on the other page, but being able to auto notify preassigned guides as soon as a booking came through would be amazing!!

Avantages

I really appreciate how easily you can customize and set specific details of listings. I believe it allows more different types of businesses to use Xola pretty easily.

Inconvénients

Being able to edit bookings which use the split payment option would be SO ideal. I often times have to cancel the booking and rebook, which makes any refunds more complicated down the road.

I would really also appreciate the feature to type the number of guests into a booking made manually, instead of having to click increase/decrease for each guest.

In the purchases tab, the order it comes up seems pretty random. It would be incredibly helpful if all purchases/cancellations/guestlists/etc would appear in chronological order. It would also be helpful if you could filter it via cancellations, etc.

There's a random glitch I'm noticing recently where the guest will input their email and phone number, but when looking at their booking through the dashboard, their email shows up twice. When I go into the customer's profile, their phone number shows.

Avantages

I like the 24/7 support. They are very knowledgable and helpful in problem solving as I just jumped into the program without looking at the support documents. This software is very user friendly and if something stumps me, I contact support and in minutes my problem is solved. We've been able to streamline our system with XOLA, eliminating wasted time, making the system easy for season staff to run the back office without a ton of training. XOLA just makes our business lives so much easier! Thank you for existing!

Inconvénients

Not much. They are continually improving. I would like to see the ability to schedule staff when they aren't with a group though.

Avantages

The software is easy to use and mostly intuitive. Over the past few years a number of features have been added to make it more user friendly. Customer service is very responsive. Site has very few "down" times and only the occasional issue with international customers having interface issues. Overall, we are pleased.

Inconvénients

There is still room for improvement. The two most annoying issues are: occasionally clients make errors entering contact email information. I cannot edit the email to help customer if they are a return client (we have a 70% return rate). System will not allow edit to a preexisting email address. Second, have have 40+ guides. There is no way to alphabetize the list of my guides when assigning them to tours. They are listed in order of joining my team. This ends up making guide assignment cumbersome. Finally, Xola is expensive. I am reluctant to have customers pay a 6% additional fee and absorb cost myself. That cost is significant and concerning.

Avantages

My favorite thing about Xola has been the extremely knowledgeable and speedy support staff always being at the ready via email, phone or 24hrs a dang day via chat. I can not tell you how key it is to understand that hours of need to not happen between 9-5 somestandardtime but can happen at anytime. To me, having someone there to bounce questions and issues or even just log a feature request is key compared to the many other software companies that offer lame "help/knowledge bases" or "video tutorials" you can search forever and still not find what you need.

I also appreciate that they are not resting on their laurels when it comes to updates and feature additions. Since I have been using Xola since Jan 2017 they have released many updates that actually have workflow function compared to "Wow.. we made it so you can add emoji's to your email signature" type of stuff I have suffered through as "function upgrades" on other platforms.

Lastly I really like that the software has the ability to be cross platform and mobile and you can still have full functionality. It is helpful that they are working towards upgrading the app as they go so more actions can be tackled through there as well.

Inconvénients

The mobile app for android at least could really use a "refresh" feature like on the web so I can swap between company accounts easier than restarting the app.

The guide management is a growing feature so I hope more develops there sooner than later which is more about my personal workflow needs than anything else.

Lastly, it is not something that has as much to do with Xola as it does with Google in that the subscribed calendar feature Xola offers does not work well with the way google imports them so I would love to see a push style calendar notification instead so those not on apple products are not left with inaccurate calendars. Again more a Google screw up than Xola but I really really want xola to rework the calendar notification option so it can integrate better cross-platform.

Avantages

Xola has put a lot of thought into making the transaction process quick and simple. Therefore, it has a very high "ease of use" rating for both our staff and our customers. Nevertheless, it is feature-rich and carries a lot of power "under the hood", giving the admin team a number of different ways to setup listings and sales flows. The tech support is also OUTSTANDING.

Inconvénients

The reporting is sufficient but not robust. They have some custom reporting options, and you can export to excel, but sometimes that can be problematic, especially if you have a lot of listings or demographics. Very cumbersome to do any type of "deep dive" into large data sets.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Xola 

Pourquoi passer à Xola

Avantages

The set up and user interface is really easy for the most part. The customer service is fast and responsive, anytime I have a problem it’s answer d in minutes over the phone. The pricing option are really good for small business/new start ups and the booking fees are very reasonable. The best part is Xola is geared towards the outdoor industry and the software easily integrates into your existing website. It also has automated features like abaindon cart as well as custom coupons and discounts which I really like. We use this software for our SUP/Kayak rental business and it has been fantastic so far.

Inconvénients

There could be more customization on the backend of the booking parameters, for instance selecting availability dates for a rental unit takes some time. I think it would be nice if Xola offered it’s own credit card terminal. It is difficult to add two separate “experiences” to one purchase, meaning if a customer of mine wanted to rent one kayak and one SUP they would have to do separate transactions.

Avantages

I love the platform's ease of use, for both the customer and the user. When using previous platforms, we had customers calling continually because they were unable to complete transactions because they were confused with the setup. And, for the back-end user, it is a breeze! In fact, we never even had to train our employees to use Xola. The backend is extremely intuitive.

And, I can't say enough about Xola's customer support. It's the best of any platform I've used. If I have a problem, Xola's chat is ALWAYS available. I also appreciate the backend functionality of being able to refund customers with store credit. The system automatically emails the customer a promo code for future use and stores the information within our system. Rebooking previous customers is also a breeze!

And, what's BEST for me, is Xola's pricing model. We live in an area with a very high sales tax and I did not want to have to charge our customers an additional 6%. With Xola, we get an incredible platform (that more than pays for itself with the "abandoned shopping cart" feature) for a flat monthly rate.

Xola is also continually tweaking the platform, making it better. The most recent backend mobile update is incredible -- giving me near full functionality from the ease of my iPad.

Inconvénients

As for cons, yikes. I really can't think of anything. When I do come across functionality features that I would like to see, I have easy access to suggest my solutions. What's even better? Xola actually listens.

Avantages

The best feature of this software is easily their Live Chat customer support. I have had only excellent and rapid responses to any question I have about the product. The Live Chat team is full of expert knowledge and friendly personalities, and is my favorite feature. I would recommend Xola for this alone!

Inconvénients

There are some places where the language and architecture of the site are confusing. Any transfer of funds are labelled "refunds" and look like money is being returned to the customer, even when it isn't. The architecture of multiple bookings is tricky to navigate, and it is too easy to cancel entire multi-room reservations when trying to only cancel one. Fortunately, the Live Chat team is there to sort out the resulting messes.

Avantages

The strength of this company is the fantastic support it provides for its clients. This is both at the set-up stage, and also after implementation has started. It is available 24/7, and if the on-line platform is not sufficient to solve the technical issue or the user-end challenge, a telephone conversation can be easily scheduled.
This was even the case at the beginning of my using the platform: I was unfamiliar with the product and needed a lot of help to navigate the site initially. This is natural, of course, but what surprised me was when I had not used a particular function after a period of time (and so I had forgotten how to perform a specific function), the support team was extremely patient with me and with my rather elementary question.

The support continued as I made non-standard bookings for my bicycle tours - each time I contacted them, the support team walked me through the necessary steps. They were helpful, polite, and understanding. Sometimes I felt embarrassed by my requests (oh, of course - duh!) “I’m sorry for bothering you” I would say afterwards, but they never made me feel the question was unjustified.

In sum, I have only good things to say about the interpersonal contact I had with Xola. I would rate them 11/10 for this aspect.

The platform itself is a good one, although there are some minor limitations for my purposes that I experienced. A few little tweaks for payments and bookings would be good.
8/10 in this category.

Inconvénients

No difficulties, just a couple of limitations for payments and parameters for booking.

Avantages

Is easy to use, my customers find it useful and the best feature for our business is to get Google Analytics data and the new Xola custom reports.

Inconvénients

We really need to show more info in the booking detail not just day picker. Maybe some custom fields like a map, conditional inputs, description, etc. I know we can get this info in the questionnaire after booking, but we believe that displaying questions like "you need pick up?" "are you arriving in airplane or cruiser?"

Avantages

-Reasonable fixed pricing per location rather than pass-through costs to customer
-Responsive support
-New features regularly
-Great back end functionality and ease of use

Inconvénients

-Still missing some features specific to my industry (robust resource management and better guide assignment)

Avantages

-Pricing options for every size company
-Constant improvements/updates to their software
-Friendly, fast support. (A Middle Fork guide on staff.)
-Decent funding. Extremely committed to the long term.

Inconvénients

-Twice I came across minor bugs. I reported them, and they were fixed in a few days.

Avantages

I believe the best feature about Xola is its customer support. Their chat function is extremely handy when you've got a last minute question or need a quick tutorial on a feature. Plus the staff is very friendly and will always guide you through any difficulties you may encounter.

Inconvénients

The thing I liked least about Xola is just learning a new software but that comes with anything worth doing. At first it seems as it may be a daunting task to learn new software for your business but the ease of use is beyond amazing and again, customer support is second to none. Got questions? They've got answers!