Short answer: the Xola per-booking fee is a fair share of bookings its checkout and recovery tooling created. It is a worse deal on bookings that arrived in your DMs. Retveno is flat-priced with no per-booking fee, but it has no ad attribution at all, so if paid acquisition drives your growth Xola wins.
Xola is a US booking and marketing platform for tours and activities, known for its checkout and abandoned-booking recovery tooling. It is sold as a monthly subscription with a per-booking fee on top.
No credit card required · Your guests keep using the apps they already love
Built for operators
Connect your channels once and the messages customers send you on WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger turn into ready-to-confirm bookings by themselves. No copy-paste, no typing, nothing for your guests to install — you just tap confirm. Only messages that mention a booking are ever read; never your private chats.
Unlike Rezdy or FareHarbor, we never take a cut of your bookings. One flat monthly price, every sale is yours.
Automatic SMS and WhatsApp reminders before each trip cut no-shows without you lifting a finger.
| Xola | Retveno | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Monthly subscription + per-booking fee | One flat monthly price |
| Commission on your own bookings | Often charged | 0% — always |
| How customers book | Marketplace or web checkout | Your WhatsApp & Instagram DMs |
| Best for | Operators running paid acquisition who want conversion tooling | Operators who sell direct over chat |
Based on each provider's publicly described pricing model at the time of writing — always check current pricing on their own website.
Most booking platforms take a per-booking fee or a commission on sales you sourced yourself. Retveno is a flat monthly subscription with 0% commission — bring the customers over your own channels and keep every euro. On 40 bookings a month at €60 average, a 6% fee is over €1,700 a year you simply stop paying.
Xola's pitch is conversion: checkout optimisation, abandoned-booking recovery, the machinery of turning paid traffic into sales. That machinery pays for itself when you are buying traffic. Operators who leave are typically not buying any — their funnel is a reel that did well and a stream of DMs, and there is no abandoned cart to recover.
Subscription plus a per-booking fee is a reasonable trade when the platform is measurably increasing the number of bookings; you are sharing the upside it created. It is a worse trade on bookings it had nothing to do with, and for a chat-first operator that is most of them.
Xola is strongest where paid acquisition is the growth engine: checkout conversion, abandoned-booking recovery and the attribution to prove which ads paid off. If you are spending real money on ads and optimising the funnel, that tooling earns its fee. Retveno has no ad attribution — we assume your demand is organic and already in your inbox.
Send a Stripe checkout link in one click to collect a deposit, and let automatic WhatsApp and SMS reminders cut no-shows before each trip. Set departures with capacity so a full group never gets double-booked. Set up in an afternoon — no developer required.
Much less. Recovery and checkout optimisation act on web traffic that arrives and hesitates. If your bookings arrive as messages rather than sessions, there is no funnel for those tools to work on, and you are paying for the part of the product you cannot reach.
Most booking platforms report revenue and occupancy rather than margin, so the per-departure profit and loss — guide time, vehicle, equipment, per-guest costs — usually ends up in a spreadsheet next to the booking system. Retveno computes it per departure, including vehicles and guides as step costs, and warns you before you accept a booking that would push a trip below the profit floor you set. See how that works.
Xola's stated model is a monthly subscription with a per-booking fee on top, quoted to the operation rather than listed as a self-serve price. So the number you are given depends on your volume and on how much of the conversion tooling you take, and any comparison has to include the per-booking half. Retveno prices differently: a flat monthly subscription — free to start, €19 or €39 a month — with 0% commission and no per-booking fee, so what you pay does not move when the season does.
Yes. One flat monthly price — no commission and no per-booking fee, on every plan. Every booking stays 100% yours.
No migration is required to get started — add your tours and start taking bookings the same day. You can move historical bookings over gradually as you go.
No. Your guests keep messaging you on WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger exactly as they do today — Retveno just turns those conversations into managed bookings for you behind the scenes.
Yes. Start free with no credit card required, upgrade when you're ready, and cancel anytime — your data always stays yours.
Compare Retveno with
FareHarborRezdyCheckfrontBókunPeek ProTrekkSoftXolaRegiondoVentrataBookeoAcuity Scheduling
Also see: Commission-free booking system · Booking software by activity · Pricing
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