What's New - June 2025 | Zoho Backstage
Plans change. People cancel. Tickets get handed off. It happens, and we understand. As an organizer, you need tools that offer flexibility for attendees while protecting your event’s integrity. That’s why we’ve built features to help you manage these situations with clarity and control.
This month’s updates may not be the flashiest, but they have a clear purpose. They are designed to give you quiet confidence, helping you say "yes" when it matters and "not this time" when it doesn’t. With that balance, your events become more than just efficient. They become intentional and genuinely human.
Let's take a look at what's new and enhanced.
Cancellation Approval
Make cancellations work for you and your attendees.
Managing cancellations is now more flexible and organizer-friendly with the new cancellation approval workflow in Zoho Backstage. Instead of canceling tickets immediately, organizers can now receive formal requests from ticket holders, review them, and choose to approve or deny them. This extra layer of control helps you stick to your event policies, handle refunds more accurately, and keep communication clear, especially for complex or high-value requests.
To turn this on:
- Navigate to Registrations > Registration Settings from the Dock, and switch on the Cancellation Approval toggle.
- Once active, any attempt by an attendee to cancel a main ticket, companion ticket, or session will create a request instead of an instant cancellation. The request will show up as Pending in the attendee’s event portal, so they can see what’s happening at any time.
On your side, these requests appear under a new Cancellation Approval tab in the Registrations module. You can check each request in detail. If it includes multiple items, such as a ticket and sessions, you can approve or deny each item separately. For example, you might approve a ticket cancellation but keep the session registrations active.
When you approve a request:
- You’ll see the attendee’s reason, the items involved, the cancellation fee (which you can still edit), the refund amount, and an optional comment box.
- Once you confirm, the request status changes to Approved on the attendee’s side.
When you deny a request:
- You’ll see the same details and can add a reason for the denial.
- The status will then update to Denied for the attendee.
- If only some items are approved, the status will show Partially Approved, and any denied items will be removed from further processing.
To help you stay on top of things, the Cancellation Approval tab has filters to see all requests or only those that are pending, approved, denied, or partially approved. This makes sorting and managing large volumes of requests easy.
- If the primary ticket is selected for cancellation, any linked sessions or companion tickets will be automatically included.
- Also, once a request has been denied, it can't be submitted again.
Plan availability: Included in the Free, Essentials, Premium, and Ultimate plans
Restriction of ticket transfers
Stronger control over how tickets change hands.
A new enhancement has been introduced to give event organizers greater control over how ticket transfers are handled. You can now decide whether to allow or restrict transfers, depending on your event’s needs. This helps prevent unauthorized resale, reduce misuse, and maintain operational clarity, which is especially important for tightly managed or high-value events.
In the past, many organizers offered attendees the flexibility to transfer tickets to others after registration, which worked well for most events. However, as some events grew more complex, organizers began to see new challenges where tighter control became necessary. For example, some reported cases where tickets purchased at the standard price were resold at higher rates, creating potential policy conflicts. In other cases, especially when attendee badges are preprinted, last-minute transfers can lead to mismatches and confusion at the venue.
To address these concerns, organizers can now enable or disable ticket transfers at any point, based on their event’s operational requirements.
To turn off ticket transfers:
- Navigate to Registrations > Registration Settings from the Dock, and switch of the Allow Ticket Transfers toggle.
- Here, the ticket transfer policy can be defined for all ticket classes or tailored to specific ticket classes. This ensures that organizers can enforce different transfer rules for different tiers or categories of tickets.
By default, when the Allow Ticket Transfers option is enabled, transfers are permitted. However, organizers also have the option to define a time window during which transfers are allowed. They can choose to allow transfers until the event start date, the event end date, or set a custom date and time. Once this defined period has passed, ticket transfers will be automatically restricted for attendees.
While attendees are subject to these restrictions, event organizers themselves will retain the ability to transfer tickets on behalf of attendees at any time, regardless of the transfer settings in place.
This is designed to help organizers prevent unauthorized resale, maintain data consistency, and ensure smooth operations on event day.
Plan availability: Included in the Free, Essentials, Premium, and Ultimate plans
Simplified refunds with automatic cancellation fee application
Spend less time on fee calculations and more time running your event smoothly.
Managing cancellations is now faster and more consistent with our new automatic cancellation fee application. When you use the Cancel and Refund option, the cancellation fee you defined during ticket setup is automatically applied to the refund amount. This removes the need for manual adjustments and helps you maintain fairness and consistency across all refunds.
Full control when you need it:
- You still have the flexibility to adjust the cancellation fee percentage before finalizing the refund. This means you can easily handle special cases, such as emergencies or loyal attendees, while protecting your revenue and saving valuable time.
If you issue a refund without canceling the ticket, such as for a goodwill gesture or a partial adjustment, no cancellation fee will be applied. In these cases, the ticket remains valid, and you can manually adjust the refund amount to suit the situation.
Automatic cancellation fees are only applied if you’ve set a cancellation fee for the ticket class during ticket setup.
This update makes your refund process quicker, clearer, and more reliable, allowing you to focus on delivering great event experiences instead of double-checking fee calculations.
Plan availability: Included in the Essentials, Premium, and Ultimate plans
Alt Text support for all website images
Make your event website more accessible and search-friendly.
Alt Text support has officially arrived in Zoho Backstage, helping you build more inclusive and discoverable event websites. Whether you are aiming for WCAG compliance or looking to improve your site's SEO performance, this feature ensures your visuals are both beautiful and meaningful.
Every time you upload an image in the website builder, you will now see an Alt Text field in the right-side panel. It comes with a default value of “image,” but you can and should replace this with a custom, descriptive phrase that accurately represents the image. This allows screen readers to convey the content to visually impaired users and gives search engines better context to index your site.
For bulk management:
- Navigate to Settings > Customize Text > Alt Text (available on all paid plans). You’ll see a preview of each image, making it easy to update values at scale. Multilingual sites are fully supported—you can switch languages and refer to the source-language Alt Text while entering translations.
For a spreadsheet-based workflow:
- The Event Website - Alt Text sheet is now part of the language export file. Update it in bulk and import it back into Backstage to instantly reflect the changes across your website.
Whether you're optimizing for discoverability or inclusivity, this update ensures your event content is both meaningful and compliant.
Plan availability: Included in the Free, Essentials, Premium, and Ultimate plans
Register companion tickets anytime (Early access)
Give attendees more flexibility for their guests.
Attendees can now register companion tickets anytime after they purchase their main ticket, as long as their ticket includes the companion benefit. They simply log in to your event website and add companion tickets from either Your Orders or Your Tickets.
From Your Orders:
- Navigate to Your Orders > Event Tickets > Register Companions. This takes them to the ticket selection page to complete the registration.
From Your Tickets:
- Navigate to Your Tickets > Register Companions. This also directs them to select and confirm companion tickets.
Each companion ticket will appear as a separate order on the website, linked to the main ticket ID. On your end, the companion registration is also tracked as its own order, keeping everything clear and organized.
We’re just getting started.
The updates you see today are only part of our bigger vision to make Zoho Backstage more flexible, reliable, and rewarding for every organizer. In the second half of 2025, we’ll roll out more practical enhancements and thoughtful tools to help you handle change smoothly, deliver better experiences, and run every event with more confidence.
Thank you for being with us on this journey. Stay tuned, because there is more to come.
Note: All the features and enhancements mentioned in this article are available across all Zoho Backstage-supported data centers.
If you have any questions or would like to try out our early access features, feel free to contact us at support@zohobackstage.com.
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