EventsAir Virtual Assistant: a VA who runs registrations, rooming lists and speaker chasing

There is a specific week in every conference cycle when the registration inbox stops being a job and becomes a backlog. Early bird closes on Friday, forty registrations are sitting incomplete, the keynote still hasn’t uploaded a headshot, the Hilton wants its rooming list, and the person responsible for all of it is also writing the sponsorship report. That’s usually the week someone searches “eventsair virtual assistant”.

EventsAir has earned its place at the centre of that week. Built in Brisbane and refined over decades of real congresses, it has powered over 350,000 events and become the default platform for Australian professional conference organisers; the PCO Association itself is a long-running EventsAir partner. Registrations, agendas, speakers, exhibitors, accommodation, travel, communications, reporting: it genuinely is all in one system. Which is precisely the problem. When everything lives in EventsAir, everything needs someone working EventsAir, and in most events teams that someone is a coordinator who is already doing three other jobs, or a director who should be selling the next congress instead of merging duplicate contacts from this one.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your EventsAir

Registrations first, every morning. The overnight batch gets processed: completed registrations checked for the right type and rate, incomplete ones followed up with a nudge to finish before the price steps up, failed payments chased while the delegate still remembers registering, and substitutions and cancellations actioned to the policy you’ve written down, never to a guess. When early bird cutover approaches, the VA confirms the registration site flips rates on the right date and that the confirmation Merge Doc still says what the new price is. Small checks. They’re the difference between a smooth close and a fortnight of refund arithmetic.

Behind the registrations sits the data, and this is where an EventsAir VA quietly earns the fee. Every duplicate contact, every organisation entered four ways, every blank dietary field is a future problem: a delegate badged twice, a sponsor report that undercounts their delegates, a gala dinner order that misses the coeliacs. The VA runs a standing hygiene pass, merging duplicates in the contact store, standardising names and organisations, and using Express Actions for the bulk corrections that would take a coordinator an afternoon record by record. Nobody notices this work. Everybody notices its absence, usually at the check-in desk.

Then the chasing, which is most of conference admin once you’re honest about it. Speakers, through the Presentations module: abstracts acknowledged when they land, review committees reminded before their deadlines rather than after, acceptance and decline merges sent on the day the committee decides, and then the slow extraction of bios, headshots, presentation uploads and AV forms from academics who will do all of it, eventually, if someone asks three times politely. Exhibitors, through the Exhibitions module and portal: stand bookings reconciled against contracts, logos and insurance certificates chased for the manual, the manifest of included exhibitor registrations tracked so booth staff aren’t surprises on bump-in day, and unpaid balances flagged to you long before anyone’s carpet tiles arrive.

Accommodation runs on its own calendar, and it is the least forgiving one. Your VA keeps the Accommodation module’s hotel inventory and sub-blocks matched to the contracts, ties every booking to a registration, sends each hotel its rooming list in the format and on the schedule that hotel expects, and watches pick-up against the block with the release dates diarised. A block that’s 40 per cent sold three weeks from release isn’t a report line, it’s an attrition bill forming, and the whole value of having someone in the module daily is that you hear about it while there’s still time to market the rate or hand rooms back. Flight details and transfer needs get captured in the Travel module for anyone you’re moving.

Communications thread through all of it. Joining instructions, tax invoices and confirmation letters built as Merge Docs; reminder sends filtered by marketing tags so exhibitors, day delegates and full registrants each get their own logistics rather than one bloated email; and every scheduled send tested against a dummy record first, because a merge field that renders as FIRSTNAME in front of two thousand delegates is the kind of mistake you only make once, and ideally never.

If your congress runs the Attendee App, it gets the same discipline: the program, speaker profiles and exhibitor listings loaded and proofed before delegates download it, and updates pushed when a room changes or a session moves, because an app showing yesterday’s schedule is worse than no app at all. Hybrid and virtual components running through OnAIR get their delegate lists, session assignments and access details checked well ahead of the day, and Auto Login Tokens tested so nobody’s first experience of your event is a login error.

Event week, the VA preps the desk they’ll never stand at: badge Merge Docs set up per registration type, the badge data audited for the formatting crimes that creep into any database, check-in lists finalised, function and dietary counts in the ops pack. During the event itself they’re online across your entire AEST day, Manila being only two to three hours behind, processing the late registrations, the name changes and the “I never got my confirmation” emails while your team works the venue. And within days of pack-down, not weeks, the reporting: attendance against registrations, function numbers, accommodation pick-up, and the reconciliation your committee, board or PCO client is waiting on.

The honest bit

EventsAir is deep software, and the depth cuts both ways. It is not a tool a casual admin picks up in an afternoon, and a VA placement doesn’t change that; it changes who spends the hours becoming fluent. Expect the first weeks to be registration processing and data work, with accommodation and presentations added as competence is proven, not assumed on day one.

None of the modules chase anyone. The Presentations portal will accept an abstract but won’t extract a headshot from a professor; the exhibitor portal will host the insurance certificate upload button indefinitely while nobody clicks it; the Accommodation module will display a release date right up until the moment it costs you money. Every deadline in a conference is met because a human followed up, and EventsAir’s genuine strength is that it gives that human one system to follow up from.

Its reporting is only as good as the data hygiene underneath, which is why the cleaning work sits so high in this role. A registration report built on a contact store full of duplicates isn’t wrong exactly, it’s confidently misleading, and confident and misleading is the worst combination a committee paper can be. And EventsAir is event software, not a year-round marketing platform: it will run your event communications superbly, but nurturing your association’s membership between congresses is a different tool and a different job.

One more thing worth saying before a discovery call rather than after: a VA at admin rates is processing capacity, not a conference producer. If your events currently run without anyone owning the critical path, adding fifteen hours of EventsAir admin will help and won’t save you. Where it transforms things is the common case, a capable events lead who is drowning in exactly the work listed above.

Finally, the obvious one: your VA works from Manila. Bump-in, the registration desk, the AV crisis at 7:52am, those belong to people physically in the building. The VA’s contribution to onsite is that everything printable, listable and checkable was finished before the doors opened.

What stays with you

The decisions that make a conference a conference are not delegable to anyone at $12-17 an hour, and we don’t pretend otherwise. Program and content calls, speaker invitations and the politics around them, sponsorship pricing and contract negotiation, hotel and venue contracts along with the attrition risk inside them, budget sign-off, refund decisions outside the written policy, and, for PCOs, the client relationship itself: all yours. On the system side, EventsAir’s per-user application roles let you keep event setup, the payment gateway and financial configuration out of the VA’s reach entirely, so the boundary is enforced by permissions, not by trust. The VA processes, chases, cleans and reports inside the events and modules you’ve granted; the committee meetings stay your problem, as they should.

What it costs and where to start

EventsAir work sits on DotVA’s admin tier at $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST. Events teams typically book 10-15 hours a week, around $500-1,100 a month, with the load naturally heavier in the run-up to a congress and lighter in the trough after it. Getting started takes 7-10 business days from first call to first login, and the opening 5-7 days are supervised inside your own EventsAir, beginning with registration processing and the contact store before anything more consequential is handed over. The $500 deposit is refundable and credits against month one, the first 30 days carry a recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and leaving only ever costs 14 days notice.

For the broader picture of a VA in an events business, start with the wedding and event planners page; the travel booking page covers the accommodation and flights side in more depth, and the data entry page covers the hygiene work that underpins everything above. Full pricing is laid out in the VA cost guide. When you’re ready, book a discovery call: every call is with Jenn, who has made 87+ Australian placements since 2024, and the most useful thing you can bring is the registration report from your last event and an honest count of the hours it ate.