Xola reviews

Best live support I've ever seen. Great product. Easy to use.

Opmerkingen: Great 24/7 customer support for me. Easy interface for my guests. Makes setting up new products and automating my web bookings very simple.

Pluspunten:

The Xola sales system works fantastically well. Yes, it does take a little bit of time to familiarize yourself with all of the bells and whistles, but thankfully they have 24/7 live support that is actually there and are fantastic. Not only can they explain to my dumb ass what actions I need to accomplish in order to toggle product listings and calendar settings, they will do it for me when I am confused or lazy. I love XOLA.

Minpunten:

Xola is made primarily for Tour Operator style businesses offering experiences and doesn't offer quite as much dynamic customizability for selling merch to the people buying tickets from you. Yes, your customers can "Add-on" an item like a T-shirt to their ticket purchase before checkout, but the Xola software doesn't give you the chance to (a) provide a product image for "Add-on" items and (b) retrieve preferential information - like Shirt Size and Color - for "Add-on" items. If your goal is to sell extra promotional merch to your clients, Xola may not be right for you. But if your goal is to make the online reservation process a breeze for your clients so that they can easily self-serve their own booking needs, Xola is HANDS DOWN the best and most intuitive I have seen.

Xola is great for tour and activity management

Opmerkingen: Xola is useful for us to collect and manage all bookings from a single platform with really low commision rates. So far we enjoy it a lot.

Pluspunten:

It is great to manage all our events at one place and accept bookings from all online distribution channels that we are present. Google Analytics integration is extremely useful to follow the success metrics directly from Google Analytics panel.

Minpunten:

Xola works definitely perfect for us, so far we haven't experienced any problem that deserves to be noted here. We are extremely satisfied with our experience with Xola Online booking System so far.

Excellent interface and usability but rigid in its features and customization

Opmerkingen: Easy to train staff, nice mobile features.

Pluspunten:

Easy to train staff on. If you can work an iPhone you can work on Xola. Good mobile access for staff

Minpunten:

- Very little customization available for unique businesses - Limited accounting reports that take heavy editing in Excel to get the needed information - Organizes by customer email instead of name, can create major problems. - Europe based support team so finding a time to connect with them can be tough - No ability for Admin accounts to make edits or corrections to individual sales, especially frustrating on the accounting side. - No archiving feature for product listings. So old products remain on all active inventory lists, becoming very cumbersome to search through. - Easy software for small/medium sized companies, not good for larger companies - Limited marketing features and hard to customize - The biggest issue for us is limited reporting especially on the accounting side. For database software, that is a huge drawback. I should be able to create and run custom reports on all of the info in the system but your stuck with a rigid structure that you then have to edit and narrow down in Excel, taking lots of extra time. We won't be able to stay with Xola as we grow unless this feature improves.

Pub Cruiser Bikes

Pluspunten:

I like everything about it and love the Bots that run specials. This has worked well with us. Also, I like the integrated waiver with Wherewolf.com..

Minpunten:

Cost is high unless you do the one where it basically passes the % charge onto the customer. I wish it had the ability to assign more than 1 bike to a time slot so that both of my bikes could run the same schedules and we did not have to have a bike 1 and a bike 2 schedule.

Jousting over the Cliffs and the Ocean

Pluspunten:

Best customer service ever User Friendly In comparison to Fare Harbor and Peek Pro - Hands down best!! Love the Loading screen phrases. They always make me smile Rescues are the stuff

Minpunten:

not being able to use same guest email twice not being able to delete guest emails affiliates are not alphabetized in settings not being able to have more than 1 code on a reservation

I feel discriminated by representative of sales team person [sensitive content hidden]

Opmerkingen: The situation was both intriguing and disappointing. We were looking around to buy CRM system for our Family Fun Center. We rich out Xola to schedule the Demo. [sensitive content hidden] response back to us, telling Xola working a lot with this kind of businesses and we are good match. Right from the outset of our meeting, [sensitive content hidden] declined to provide the demo version, despite previously indicating via email that we were well-suited. His conduct towards me was discourteous, consistently asserting that our business was not yet operational, hence his refusal to provide the demo. I explained that we were only awaiting a single permit, which we expected to receive within a week. We required time to integrate the Xola CRM system into our software to ensure readiness for business operations upon opening our doors to customers. Even after commencing operations, we made another few requests for the demo but received no response. I feel discriminated against by [sensitive content hidden] . It appears that he alone has the authority to decide whether the demo is shown. It is concerning that if [sensitive content hidden] does not favor you, you may not receive the demo at all. I can only imagine the challenges of working with this customer service representative.

Pluspunten:

Very disappointing, horrible customer service and support.

Minpunten:

Very disappointing, horrible customer service and support.

Everything I need and Quick Support

Opmerkingen: We need to have an online booking system for a variety of services and the program accommodates those needs. I have tried a few other programs prior to Xola but have not had the need to look elsewhere since using them.

Pluspunten:

Ease of use. Setting up the new listings is fairly easy, even if there is a lot of details to fill in each time. Customer service is top notch and usually always available on chat!

Minpunten:

No option for more POS style bookings. We have a lot of walk in customers who combine different activities but when making a booking for those though Xola at the counter, we have to creatively enter the activities. We have an arcade setting with Escape Rooms. Our arcade are is Virtual Reality with booth space rentals with various time slots. It is too difficult to create a time slot for each time and booth.

Love this company

Opmerkingen: Xola's technical support is great. Every representative has been knowledgeable, timely, and friendly. I can't say enough good things about their support.

Pluspunten:

The software is very robust and satisfies all of my needs.

Minpunten:

I wish they had more display options on the frame that shows on my website.

Just Use It.

Pluspunten:

The best software on the market for tour bookings and management. I’ve researched over 20 other competitors- don’t waste your time if you’re shopping around- get Xola.

Minpunten:

It doesnt have some of the nuances we would like to see, and they changed their booking layout in a way that I think is not an improvement. However, I think they will continue to make improvements

Need more customization for coupons campaigns

Opmerkingen: Overall with some work around it's bee useful for our company. They have been steady on feature updates and made some great improvements over the year. Their customer service is great and willing to take advice on potential updates and limitations of the software.

Pluspunten:

Easy to use, higher level GUI that makes it easy for non-computer savvy users. Customer support has always been great, quick chat feature allows me to work in Xola and resolve simple and complex problems. Web based cloud service works great in real-time bookings, availability. System is fully able to handle online bookings, agent bookings, all within the scope of our services. It automates the confirmation emails, processes payments and sends reminders

Minpunten:

We offer kayaking, super simple but we need 3 options. Single Kayak, Double Kayak and a seat in a Double kayak. To fix this we constantly have to check and double check. If we we're able to offer seats and still use shared inventory correctly we could offer cheaper rate options for budget concerned customers. We use coupon campaigns to represent 3rd party tickets / vendors. I really wish we had a backup database in case a campaign accidentally gets deleted or corrupt. Heavy RAM usage and can cause delays when we have a robust calendar and multiple tours / shared inventory System crashes when pricing is updated. Users need to log off and back on to resolve this issue.

Come for the booking software, stay for the customer service.

Opmerkingen: Positive experience, nice team, good software.

Pluspunten:

Xola has a ton of features that make it easy to keep everything a customer purchases all in one place. The gift card sales easily integrate with the reservation system so customers can redeem them themselves online, gift offers help us sell more of them, the CRM allows us to easily export customer info and send them targeted emails and global settings allow us to automatically send emails to customers asking for reviews or send a discount code for them to come back in. All around a great software, but many softwares have similar features. What sets Xola apart from other companies we've dealt with it their customer service. Someone is always available to answer questions in the online chat or you can easily schedule a call with a support person if you have more in-depth questions. I also appreciate that we receive emails when certain features might be down. We've used software companies in the past that don't let us know of potential issues until we are the ones reporting them! Xola pre-empts this and answers our questions before we run across any issues.

Minpunten:

Because this software is very flexible and there are so many options, some of the back office features can be tricky to use. For example, when you need to process a refund for a customer, you have three options to select from (reduce booking value and refund, refund only etc.). They do a good job of labeling things with descriptions, but it can still take some getting used to and training. Also, the page that Xola takes customers to when they click Book Now on our website is all Xola-branded. It would be awesome to allow customization to this page to include our logo so that customers trust they are still on the correct website. Finally, I'm not a fan of 6% fee they are charging every customer now. This is a recent transition from a paid monthly subscription from us to an additional fee paid by our customers. After some research, it seems like this is the industry standard now, but we hate that we have to charge our customers an additional fee to make a reservation with us online. We want to encourage our customers to make reservations online so our in-store staff isn't bogged down with taking reservations over the phone. Additionally, Xola is making quite a bit more money off of us and our customers by tacking on that percentage compared to the monthly fee we used to pay. This is one of the only cons to the software.

I recently moved 4 tour companies onto Xola from other options and I am happy to never look back!

Opmerkingen: Slicker guest interface as well as a more intuitive and cleaner user interface for staff.

Pluspunten:

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.

Minpunten:

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.

My experience with Xola has been outstanding. I've used two other systems - PeekPro and Bookeo.

Pluspunten:

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.

Minpunten:

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.

Very easy and convenient to use

Opmerkingen: I am an employee of the owner who uses Xola for Buffalo Pedal Tours. I really like that as I'm headed to a tour I can just open the app and within 5 seconds I'm looking at the name of the person who booked and it only shows tours that are booked for me. I really like that I don't have to "check the schedule" to see when I work, like restaurant staff, since sometimes tours are booked only a day in advanced. The notification system through email ensures I'm not missing any tours I've been booked. So overall its a great piece of software. Keep up the good work and keep improving!

Pluspunten:

-I love that with my tours I can just go onto the app and check without having to keep track myself of what days I work. -The app is intuitive, clean, and easy to use. -I like that I can see my bookings on the desktop site and sync the calendar with my gmail calendar. -I like that when I get booked a tour it sends an email to me.

Minpunten:

Improvements that can be made: -The desktop site does not allow me to see see the Questionnaire. I have to reference the app to see what the customer wrote. -I don't have the need for a credit card reader, yet the app asks me every time I open it. Once I accidentally said "yes" while wearing headphones and thought I may have gone deaf when I high pitch tone assaulted my eardrums. -I can't confirm a tour through the app. Its inconvenient because then I have to find the specific email and then enter my login thru a web browser. In-app tour confirmation would be much less hassle.

Good & easy to use

Opmerkingen: Advance purchase and daily ACH deposits are great. Having client emails will be helpful too.

Pluspunten:

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.

Minpunten:

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.

Have been with Xola for 3 years - Happy to recommend!

Pluspunten:

We're a TO in Europe and have more or less had a good experience with Xola with no plans to jump ship. They began working with outward bound service providers in the US and when we arrived with dozens of complicated walking tours, we tested them. Xola have listened to us and made some improvements, but several are still pending and have been for 3 years. Their CEO has been notified about these service limitations (how to price private tours, how to store age banded price ranges for future time periods with 100% flexibility, and others...) and we hope he'll get on it. In general though, Xola is a big thumbs up against the weaker providers like Rezdy and Trekksoft which are both inferior to Xola. Chat support is first class (Milos, in particular).

Minpunten:

Xola have hired some poor account managers in the past. They need to improve on this although I am referring to former staff who were at Xola in 2016. Now gone and all ok). Xola have a free account for start ups with only a few tours. This is only available for US customers and it's unfair. They must offer this to customers in all countries.

Xola: Almost Perfect, But Definitely Worth It

Opmerkingen: Xola has helped us integrate all of our booking solutions into a single dashboard and streamlined the process of connecting with customers and letting them book our product easily and efficiently.

Pluspunten:

We love the different dashboards and views. It's versatile but very user-friendly.

Minpunten:

There is no SMS feature for employees. The scheduling is outdated (have to schedule one activity at a time). Xola Kiosk is only available for admin use which is a big security risk. Can't use for brick and mortar AND mobile.

Great service until they changed

Pluspunten:

Great booking software with wonderful tools like invoicing, analytics, and customization. Customer service is also wonderful and prompt.

Minpunten:

It was about 4x the cost as my previous software but totally worth the cost until they changed their plan to get 6% of my customers money with their fees. I now pay “nothing” per month but my clients have to pay and I have to now switch companies since I don’t want to pass fees onto them.

Excellent Booking Software -- I don't understand why EVERYBODY isn't using it.

Opmerkingen: Xola software has always been good, but recently it has become even better with lots of additional features. I don't need all of the capability, like 3rd party booking, because my business is not that large. Other software always seems to force new features on your business model whether you wan them or not. Fine if we are talking about computer games. But when it's software you and your business have co-evolved with it, it's ding-dang annoying when somebody wants to change what you have perfect just because they made an update. Xola does NOT do that they. They just invite to do a quick thumbs up or down reply when they add a new element and let you get back to work. VERY refreshing! But it's nice to see Xola keeping pace with the competition.

Pluspunten:

Xola booking software allows for maximum customization. I've grown so comfortable with it, tweaking little time-saving things for myself and my customers that it feels like they wrote the code with my exact tourism business in mind.

Minpunten:

It's a little more expensive in terms of booking fees than some of their so-called competitors, but I pass the cost on to the consumers - so no big deal.

Perfect solution for our touring company

Opmerkingen: After checking out many other options we gave Xola a go. Within 2 weeks they made all our listings, copied our agenda and

Pluspunten:

* tech support chat 24/7. We do most of our business in the weekend! * great resource and guide management. We plan our boats and skippers without stress * integrated Stripe payment * great reporting to excel * very easy integration in our WordPress site

Minpunten:

- app not 100% on all Android phones. IOS is great. - no integration with our IZettle credit card readers

Xola Fan, make that a Super Fan

Opmerkingen: it makes running our tour business so much easier

Pluspunten:

I love Xola for so many reasons; The mobile view from the customer pov is so clean compared to other options i looked at, this is important for conversions. Cart abandonment emails, have a crazy high response rate, and we knock down so many deals. Reservationsist can tag bookings, so we can pay them commission Past customer data is all saved to expedite repeat bookings Really easy to charge balance day off tour. Software is flexible to change an customize specific day schedule. Add ons can be hidden from customer view so we can Most of all the Xola staff (particularly Delamon and Kelsey) is so cool, responsive, and they really get tour businesses, they are open to new features

Minpunten:

I wish it had two way sync with google cal intergration, we use this for driver view of schedule plus a few other things

Potential for more harm than good for your business

Opmerkingen: Xola is not a reliable platform that I would recommend for any savvy business owner. A reliable platform does not suddenly increase it's pricing 10 or 20 fold arbitrarily. If you are evaluating Xola, take a close look at their pricing. I hope that they have changed up their pricing plans by the time you are reading this, because they are tops in terms of feature set, look and feel and customer support.

Pluspunten:

Xola has the BEST feature set, an amazing look and feel that your customers will love and they have a solid support team - the friendliest and most helpful ever.

Minpunten:

In March 2020 they are rolling out a new mandatory pricing plan where they will take a large percentage of all bookings rather than a monthly fee. For us it means going from $200/month to $2K-$4K+/month depending on our sales and marketing.

Manager

Opmerkingen: We enjoy using XOLA wish it was a little cleaner and simpler sometimes but overall we are satisfied.

Pluspunten:

Flexible to switch experiences, ease of booking on back and front in,

Minpunten:

Gift Certificates: not able to purchase multiple certificates for different experiences, one person can't buy multiple gift certificates for different people in same transaction Back office: can't override booking capacity, can't book one group with different experiences have to book separately Accounting: would be nice if you could be compatible with Quick-books, daily transactions are confusing and not clean cut

Big promises, moderate delivery

Opmerkingen: Xola courted us to bring our business to their system. From the first point of contact we outlined the essential need for a module that allows for the use of discount coupons that are not inside XOLA. i.e. Groupon. They swore up and down that they were working on it and it would be handled shortly. Thats was over two years ago and still it is not in place. All we get are vague promises that it's coming soon.

Pluspunten:

The overall structure of the back-end and UI is exceptional.

Minpunten:

Xola promised a feature to handle varying degree of taxes that come with using discount vouchers like Groupon... That was 2 years ago.. Still haven't seen it and they fail to acknowledge that without it, my company must eat a percentage of the taxes. total fail.

A great investment for online reservations & ticketing.

Opmerkingen: Exceptional service & support.

Pluspunten:

Solid, very well thought out, very few issues and outstanding support.

Minpunten:

Xola lacks Fraud control tools. Basic things like black lisiting customers & cards.