A confex needs at least six registration types: paid delegates, free visitors, exhibitor staff, speakers, press and VIPs. Give each its own form, its own capacity and its own badge colour, keep speakers, press and exhibitor staff behind private links, and let the answers drive the badge. The registration desk then prints the right badge first time.
Why Does a Confex Need More Than One Registration Type?
A confex is two events wearing one lanyard: a conference with paying delegates and an exhibition with mostly free visitors. They want different things. Delegates want sessions, dietary options and an invoice-friendly receipt. Visitors want to get in, scan a few stands and leave before the car park charges overtime.
Push all of them through one form and everybody answers questions meant for somebody else. The visitor is asked about workshop preferences, the speaker is asked to pick a visitor interest, and the exhibitor staff member is asked how they heard about the show while standing behind a stand they paid for. Completion drops, the data turns to soup, and the badge prints with the wrong colour.
The fix is boring and effective: one registration type per audience. In eventcloud each ticket group (the attendee type) gets its own form, so the questions you ask follow the person rather than the other way round. If you are new to the idea, our piece on asking different questions of different attendee types covers the mechanics.
Which Six Registration Types Should a Confex Start With?
Start with these six and add only when a real audience turns up that does not fit. Each answer below is the first thing the organiser decides: who can see it, and what it needs to ask.
Delegates
The paying conference audience. Public ticket group, stacked price windows that switch themselves from early bird to door, a capacity that matches the conference room rather than the whole venue, and session booking if your programme runs parallel tracks. Group rates apply when a company registers a team in one order, with up to 99 of one ticket type per order line. Ask for job title, company, dietary needs and the sessions they intend to attend.
Visitors
The free exhibition audience, and usually the biggest number in the building. Keep the form short: name, email, company, job function and the two or three interest questions your exhibitors actually care about. A long visitor form is the quickest way to turn a good pre-registration campaign into a queue at the door. Visitor capacity should reflect fire limits and the hall, not a guess.
Exhibitor Staff
Never public. Exhibitors should register their people through a private ticket group reachable only by a secret link that you send to each exhibiting company. That keeps stand staff out of the visitor numbers, lets you cap passes per company with an email-domain promo code, and gives you a clean list for build-up, badges and any lead retrieval you offer. For the exhibition side of the show, our trade show and exhibition page shows how the pieces fit.
Speakers
Also private. Speakers need a different form from delegates: biography fields, session title, travel notes, dietary needs and a consent line for filming. Give them a secret link, a complimentary price, and a badge design that marks them out at a glance so the hosts can find them before their slot.
Press
A private ticket group with a short form: publication, role, and what they plan to cover. Press passes are usually free and limited, so set a capacity. Need press accreditation to be approved before a pass is issued? Tell us how your accreditation works at the contact page.
VIPs
The small group that generates the most emails. A private ticket group lets you register guests of honour, sponsors and board members without exposing a public sign-up page. Add a question for the person who looks after them so the hosting team knows who to meet at the door.
How Do Private Links and Capacity Keep the Types Apart?
A private ticket group is reachable only by its secret link, so the public registration page lists delegates and visitors and nothing else. Speakers, press, VIPs and exhibitor staff never appear on it, which means nobody can wander into the wrong form, and you do not have to police it.
Capacity works per ticket type and across the whole event. Set a ceiling on each audience so one group cannot eat the venue: the visitor type might stop at the hall limit, press at forty, and exhibitor staff at whatever your stand contracts allow. When a type fills, it closes. Nothing is capped by eventcloud itself; the limits above are the ones you choose for the show.
A Form for Every Audience. Answers on Every Badge.
Delegates, speakers and exhibitors each get their own registration form, and every answer flows to badges, emails and the Excel export.
One practical rule: name the types the way the people on them describe themselves. If your exhibitors call themselves "exhibitors", do not label the group "Commercial partner staff". The link goes in an email, and nobody should need a glossary to work out which one is theirs.
How Should the Answers Drive the Badge?
The badge is the only thing every attendee wears for two days, so it earns real design effort. In eventcloud the badge designer works in real millimetres and takes live data from any registration question, so the name, company and attendee type on the badge come straight from the form. Colour by type is the classic move: delegates one colour, visitors another, exhibitor staff a third, speakers and press their own. A security guard can read it from across the hall.
Your badge design should answer three questions from five metres away: who is this, which audience are they, and where are they allowed. Everything else belongs on the registration list, not the lanyard. Our badge printing page shows how types, answers and print fit together, and the Badge Kiosk lets visitors type their ticket number and print their own badge at the entrance, which is how you keep a thousand free visitors from queueing at a staffed desk.
What Do Other Tools Say About Registration Types?
The table compares what three competitors state about the attributes a confex cares about, based on their own pricing pages as read between 4 and 6 November 2026: Eventcombo (page updated 22 October 2026), Eventleaf and Zoho Backstage. None of them publishes full detail on every line, and a feature missing from a pricing page may still exist in the product, so treat "not stated" as exactly that.
| Tool | Hidden or Private Ticket Types | Custom Intake Forms | Badge Designer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eventcombo | Hidden access codes and promo codes on Professional | Listed on Enterprise | Custom badge designer listed on Business |
| Eventleaf | Not stated on its pricing page | Not stated on its pricing page | Badge designer listed on all tiers |
| Zoho Backstage | Not stated on its pricing page | Not stated on its pricing page | Check-in and badging listed from the Free tier |
| eventcloud | Private ticket groups reachable by secret link | A separate form per ticket group | Designer in millimetres with live answers from any registration question |
The pattern is that private types and per-audience forms often sit behind higher plans or go unmentioned. With eventcloud they are the starting point: every capability we ship is on every seat, and we count team seats, not tickets.
What Should the Registration Desk Be Able to Do on the Day?
The desk should be able to find a person by ticket, print the badge that matches their type, and move on. Check-in runs in a browser on any phone or tablet with one link and a four digit PIN, finds a ticket by QR scan or a typed code (including the nine digit ticket number), and shows name, email, phone, company, ticket and pass type. It flags repeat scans and refuses refunded or unpaid tickets, which is more useful than it sounds when someone forwards a speaker link to a friend.
For the conference side, session booking lets delegates reserve places in parallel tracks, and session scanning at the door of each session admits or refuses with a running count against capacity. Neither touches the visitor flow, which is the point of keeping the types separate.
A Short Checklist Before You Open Registration
Write the list of audiences on one page. Give each a name, a form, a capacity and a badge colour. Decide which are public and which are private, and who sends each secret link. Test one registration per type and look at the badge it produces. Then open the doors.
Running something with a registration type we have not mentioned, such as a delegation or a student pass? Tell us what your confex needs at our contact page.
