The booking software that experience businesses actually use

It's 8:47 a.m. and a zipline operator in Colorado is juggling a last-minute group cancellation, a phone booking from a walk-in family, and a flash sale she just pushed live on Groupon - all while her staff is checking in customers on a tablet by the parking lot. Twelve months ago, this was a disaster waiting to happen. Today, it's Tuesday.

That quiet competence is what Xola sells. Not software, exactly - more like the organizational muscle that experience businesses never had. Xola is a San Francisco-based SaaS company founded in 2011 that builds booking, operations, and marketing tools for the tours and activities industry. More than 1,200 operators rely on it to run their businesses, from one-person kayak rentals to multi-location immersive attractions.

The platform handles reservations flowing in from a dozen different channels simultaneously - the operator's own website, Google Search, Expedia, TripAdvisor, Groupon, a walk-up kiosk, and a phone call - and reconciles all of it in real time. Staff see the same picture. Inventory doesn't oversell. Customers get confirmations instantly.

The global tours and activities industry is estimated to be worth $120-135 billion. For context, that's larger than the global car rental market. And for most of the 2010s, the majority of it was being managed through voicemail, notepads, and the occasional Excel file.

The problem wasn't that operators were unsophisticated. It's that enterprise software never came for them. The industry is composed almost entirely of small and medium-sized businesses - boat tour companies, escape rooms, cooking classes, adventure parks - that don't have IT departments or six-figure software budgets. The tools that existed either treated them like hotels (wrong fit) or were so stripped down as to be useless.

Meanwhile, customer expectations were moving in exactly the opposite direction. Travelers were booking flights on their phones, comparing prices in real time, and expecting instant confirmations. A form-fill-and-wait booking experience wasn't just inconvenient; it was a conversion killer. Every friction point between "I want to do this" and "I'm confirmed" was a customer Xola's operators never got.

Scott Zimmerman, who came up through ThoughtWorks, Intel, and Fidelity Investments, co-founded Xola alongside Anush Ramani, who took the CTO seat. The founding bet was direct: enterprise-caliber software could be built specifically for the tours and activities category, priced and designed for small operators, and delivered via the cloud without requiring a six-month implementation project.

That meant no tiered plans where the good features live behind a paywall. Every Xola customer - a family running whale-watching tours in Massachusetts and a VR attraction company operating in multiple cities - gets the same full platform. Setup is free. Onboarding support is included. Live customer support runs 24 hours a day.

The company raised a seed round and then a $6 million Series A in February 2016, backed by Rakuten Capital (the investment arm of the Japanese e-commerce and travel giant), alongside Bee Partners, WI Harper Group, and CSC Upshot. Rakuten's involvement wasn't purely financial - Rakuten Travel also brought distribution relationships that extended Xola's reach into international markets.

Xola's platform is organized around a central truth: experience businesses touch customers across a dozen different surfaces before anyone actually shows up. There's the operator's own website, Google, Expedia, TripAdvisor, Groupon, a walk-in at the desk, a phone call, a reseller partner. Each one is a potential booking. Each one is also a potential conflict with every other channel if the inventory isn't synchronized.

The Command Center is where operators see all of it at once - real-time capacity, staff schedules, equipment allocation, and customer communications on a single dashboard. Dynamic pricing rules can be set to adjust rates by season, day of week, time of day, or group size. Waitlists fill cancellations automatically. Xolabot handles follow-up emails, review requests, and loyalty campaigns without anyone clicking send.

The customer list tells you who the platform works for. Small family operations make up the bulk of it - kayak tours, escape rooms, ziplines, cooking classes, boat cruises. The kind of businesses that have three seasonal employees and a marketing budget measured in hundreds, not thousands, of dollars per month. Xola was built for them first.

But it also runs The VOID, a critically-acclaimed immersive VR experiences company, which says something about where the ceiling is. The same platform that powers a single-location axe throwing venue handles a multi-city, multi-format attraction business. The architecture scales without asking operators to change plans or negotiate enterprise contracts.

The review numbers are unusually consistent for a B2B product. A 4.8 on G2 and a 4.7 on Capterra across 573 verified reviews aren't marketing numbers - they're the kind of scores that accumulate when customers who had a frustrating problem before genuinely don't have it anymore. Operators mention the same things repeatedly: setup was faster than expected, the support team is responsive, and they stopped dreading double-bookings.

There's a specific kind of business Xola was built for: the ones that sell experiences, not things. A hot air balloon company in Napa. A surfing lesson operation in San Diego. A ghost tour company in New Orleans. These businesses are, in most cases, the actual reason people travel somewhere. They're also the last ones to get good software.

Xola's mission is to fix that imbalance. The framing is direct: enterprise-caliber tools, built for operators of all sizes. The key word is "all" - Xola's flat pricing model means that a first-year operator running weekend paddleboard tours has access to the same dynamic pricing engine, the same marketing automation, and the same API integrations as a company running 50 experiences a day across multiple cities.

The team is about 56 people spread across San Francisco, Houston, and Bangalore, and has been engineering-first from the beginning. Xola's GitHub shows an active open-source practice: a React UI kit built with Tailwind CSS, payment processing driver integrations, and a Symfony bundle for Omnipay. These aren't vanity projects - they reflect how the product gets built.

The "experience economy" is one of those phrases that consultants love and operators ignore because they're too busy actually running experiences. But the numbers behind the cliche are real. Younger consumers consistently report prioritizing experiences over things. The $135 billion tours and activities market has been one of the fastest-growing segments of travel, and it remains one of the least digitized.

Most of the industry's technology infrastructure - booking engines, channel management, CRM - was built by companies that didn't start in this category. They adapted hotel software, repurposed event management tools, or built something custom that broke every time the team changed. Xola is one of the few platforms designed from the ground up for how experience businesses actually work: variable-capacity events, weather-dependent scheduling, last-minute bookings, and customers who want to know exactly what they're getting before they pay.

The platform continues to grow its App Store, adding third-party tools that operators can install directly without developer help. The digital waiver system was updated for streamlined liability management. The Xola Phone app was refreshed in early 2026 to give operators more management control from wherever they happen to be - which, for most of them, is not behind a desk.

That's what good software does. It disappears. The operator doesn't think about Xola any more than she thinks about electricity - it's just the thing that makes everything else work. The experience business she built still depends on her judgment, her staff, and the fact that flying through the air above a canyon is, objectively, a good time. Xola just makes sure the seats are filled, the waivers are signed, and the confirmation email got there before the customer did.