When a company sends twelve delegates to your conference, take one order from the person booking, collect each delegate's own details and email address on it, and let a group rate apply itself by quantity. Every delegate then gets their own confirmation and ticket, the booker gets the order summary, and nobody emails you a spreadsheet called final_v3.
What Does the Person Booking for a Group Actually Need?
Four things, and none of them is a clever feature. The booker (an office manager, a team lead, a PA with a company card) needs to pay once, name the people, get a document finance will accept, and know what happens when Priya from sales drops out the week before.
What they usually get instead is a form built for one person, which they fill in twelve times with their own email address, so twelve tickets land in one inbox and your badge desk meets twelve people called "Accounts Dept". The cure is to design the group path on purpose, as part of registration, before the first delegation asks.
It matters most at corporate events, training days and association conferences, where a handful of employers can account for a large share of the room. Get the group path right and those bookings arrive early and clean. Get it wrong and they arrive as an email thread.
How Do Registration Tools Model a Group?
There are three models on the market: the booker adds people inside one registration, a coordinator manages the delegation in a portal of their own, or a manager requests places and someone approves them. Each row below rests on the vendor's own page, read on 14 November 2026 and linked underneath. Where a page did not say, the cell says so.
| Tool | Who Enters the Delegates | After Booking | Paying |
|---|---|---|---|
| RegFox | The registrant adds other attendees during their own registration; fixed or variable group sizes | Edit one registrant or add to an existing group without cancelling the rest | Refunds worked out for one person, part of a group or all of it |
| EventsAir | A group coordinator in a coordinator portal, one by one or by importing a contact file | The coordinator adds and removes people and can email each a registration link | One group payment or individual payments, with invoices listed in the portal |
| vFairs | A group registration element on the form: one ticket type in multiples by default, mixed ticket types as an option | Not stated on the page read | Not stated on the page read |
| Bizzabo | Its own guide describes a manager or team lead creating the group, with an approver checking budget and eligibility | Substitutions until badges are finalised | Centralised, split or hybrid, with a PO number or budget code before approval |
| eventcloud | The booker, on one order: a form for each named delegate, up to 99 of a ticket type per order line | Each delegate signs in by emailed link to edit their own answers and download their ticket | One card payment for the order, with group rates applied by quantity |
Sources: RegFox group registration page; EventsAir help centre, updated 27 August 2026; vFairs help centre; Bizzabo's group registration guide, 22 October 2025.
The models suit different events. A congress where national delegations of sixty change weekly leans towards a coordinator. A conference where most groups are four to fifteen colleagues booked in one sitting is well served by the first model, as long as each delegate ends up as a real person in your list.
How Do Group Rates Work Without Handing Out Discount Codes?
A group rate is a price that changes with quantity, shown to everyone, applied by the checkout. That is the whole trick, and it beats the alternative, which is a promo code called TEAM10 that ends up on a deals forum by Thursday.
In eventcloud, any paid price window can carry up to six group rates, each in the form "from N tickets, X each". They are counted per pass, per order. As a made-up illustration: a delegate pass at 400 each, 360 each from five and 320 each from ten. A booker who adds ten delegate passes to one order pays the ten-plus rate on all ten, and sees why on the page.
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.
Promo codes still have their job (a speaker's guest, a partner offer), and a code can be set to skip group rates, so a group price and a code never stack by accident. Early bird windows keep working underneath: each price window has its own group rates, so the early group rate and the standard group rate can differ.
Whose Email Address Goes on Each Ticket?
Each delegate's own. This is the rule that separates a group booking from a bulk purchase, and it is worth enforcing in the software so you do not have to enforce it by phone.
When a ticket in eventcloud asks for attendee details, each person on the order needs their own email address. Everyone whose details were filled in gets their own confirmation and ticket, with a calendar file attached, in their own language if your event offers more than one. The person who books always gets an order confirmation with the order summary and full totals, listing who each ticket went to. Because the answers belong to each delegate, they flow to that delegate's badge and to the Excel export, which is what your badge desk and your caterer actually read. The step by step version is in our conference registration setup checklist, from ticket groups to badges.
For the finance department, add a purchase order number question to the form so the reference travels with the order. Coming soon: invoices and pay by invoice. Does your biggest client only pay on invoice? Tell us how their process works.
What If the Names Arrive as a Spreadsheet Anyway?
Some will. A sponsor with forty staff passes in the contract, a university department on a block booking, a client whose procurement team has never met a web form it trusted. Plan a second route for them and keep it under your control.
eventcloud's registration gives you two. The first is a private ticket group reachable only by a secret link: send the link to the company, cap the ticket type at the number agreed, and their people register themselves on a form written for them. The second is attendee import from Excel or CSV on a published event. Every row is checked before anything is written, the import creates real orders and tickets, and emails go out only if you choose to send them.
Coming soon: a group bookings coordinator portal. Do your delegations change every week until doors open? Tell us how your groups book today.
One more thing that a big delegation does not change: the bill. eventcloud counts team seats, not registrations, so a company that sends 99 people costs you nothing extra to register.
What Should Your Group Booking Policy Say?
Write five lines and put them on the registration page, above the form. Most group headaches are questions nobody answered in advance, and a published policy answers them before the phone rings.
What counts as a group. State the number where the group rate starts and say that it applies to passes of the same type in one order.
Names by when. Every place needs a named delegate with their own email address at booking. If you allow placeholders, give the date by which they must be replaced, and tie it to your badge print run.
Substitutions. Say whether a colleague can take a place, until what date, and who to contact. Free substitutions up to a week before is a common and kind default for corporate events.
Who hears from you. Tell the booker that each delegate will receive their own ticket and joining information, so they can stop forwarding emails.
Paperwork. Explain what the booker receives after paying and where a purchase order reference goes.
Then test it the way a booker would. Open your own form, book five places for five colleagues with five real inboxes, and read what each of them receives. If any of the five has to ask you a question, fix that line of the policy before the first real delegation turns up.
