If you’re running an event where different groups of people need to pay different fees — say, a trade show where new exhibitors pay $750 for a booth and returning exhibitors pay a lower renewal rate — Cvent can absolutely handle it. But because the setup touches three different areas of the platform (registration types, pricing, and registration paths), it’s easy to configure just one piece and end up with pricing that doesn’t apply correctly, or a registration type that attendees can’t even select.
This guide walks through the full setup, in order, and covers the mistakes that most commonly break it.
Before you start: know the difference between three settings
People often use “registration type,” “category,” and “path” interchangeably — but in Cvent they control different things, and mixing them up is the #1 reason pricing tiers don’t work as expected.
- Registration Type / Attendee Category — defines who someone is (e.g., New Exhibitor, Returning Exhibitor, Member, Non-Member). This is the label attached to their record.
- Fees & Pricing — defines how much each registration type pays, and can include early-bird windows, deadlines, or tiered pricing.
- Registration Path — defines what registration flow a person is routed through based on how they access the site (a link, an invitation, or a public registration page). Paths are what let you show different fees, questions, or steps to different audiences.
If any one of these three isn’t configured, the other two won’t behave the way you expect — the most common symptom is a fee that either doesn’t apply, applies to everyone, or a registration type attendees can’t select at all.
Step 1: Create your registration types
- Open your event and go to Registration → Registration Types (or General → Registration Types, depending on your Cvent platform version).
- Click Add Registration Type for each audience you need — for a trade show example, you’d create:
- New Exhibitor
- Returning Exhibitor
- Give each one a clear, attendee-facing name. Avoid internal shorthand (“Ret. Exh.” confuses registrants) — this label often appears on the registration form itself.
- Set the status of each type to Active only once you’re ready for people to register under it. Leaving unused types active is a common source of registration confusion later.
Step 2: Set up the fees for each type
- Go to Fees & Payment (sometimes labeled Pricing depending on your product).
- Create a separate fee item for each registration type — don’t try to reuse one fee item and discount it down for the second group. Separate fee items give you cleaner reporting and avoid the discount-code conflicts covered below.
- For each fee, set:
- Amount (e.g., $750 for New Exhibitor, $500 for Returning Exhibitor)
- Availability window, if the fee should only be offered during a certain registration period
- Attendee category / registration type it applies to — this link is what actually ties the price to the right group. It’s the step most often skipped.
- If you’re also capping how many booths or seats are available per category, set the capacity for that fee item here too, not just at the overall event level. Capacity set only at the event level won’t stop one group from using up all the spots meant for another.
Step 3: Build (or check) your registration paths
- If exhibitors are registering through a single public link, you’ll typically need a path with a selection step — a screen where the registrant picks “New Exhibitor” or “Returning Exhibitor” before seeing pricing.
- If you already know who’s who (e.g., you have a list of last year’s exhibitors), you can instead use an invitation list tied to a specific registration type, so returning exhibitors land directly on their pricing without having to self-select. This also reduces the risk of someone picking the cheaper option they don’t actually qualify for.
- Test each path in preview mode as a registrant would see it — not just from the admin view — before sending invitations. Admin previews sometimes show all types regardless of path restrictions, which can mask a setup error.
Registration paths control who sees which registration type in the first place.
Step 4: Apply discount codes carefully (if you're using them on top of tiered pricing)
This is where a lot of setups break. If you’re layering a discount code on top of an already-tiered fee structure (for example, “2+ booths get 10% off,” in addition to the New/Returning pricing), go to Discount Codes and scope the code narrowly:
- Restrict it to the specific registration type(s) it should apply to — don’t leave it available to all categories by default.
- If the discount should only kick in once a minimum number of registrants are already in a group, use the “minimum attendees already registered” condition rather than trying to recreate that logic with a second discount code layered on the first.
- Set a clear start and end date on the code itself, separate from your general registration deadline, if it’s meant to apply only during a promotional window.
Discount codes that aren’t scoped tightly enough are the most common cause of a fee being “over-applied” — where a discount meant for one small group ends up reducing the price for everyone who registers.
Step 5: Test with real accounts, not just the admin preview
Before you launch:
- Register a test account under each registration type.
- Confirm the correct fee appears, not a default or blended price.
- Confirm any discount code behaves as scoped (apply it to a test account that shouldn’t qualify and make sure it’s rejected).
- Pull a quick registration report and check that the registration type field is populating correctly for each test record — this is what you’ll rely on later for reporting and badge printing.
Common issues and how to fix them
A registrant sees the wrong price. Check whether the fee item is actually linked to their registration type (Step 2) — this link is separate from simply naming the fee similarly.
A discount code is discounting more than it should. Re-check the code’s category and date restrictions. A code with no restrictions applies to every registration type and every date by default.
An attendee can’t find their registration type on the form. This is almost always a registration path issue — either the type wasn’t added to the path they’re using, or the path is routing them somewhere else entirely.
Reports show the wrong category for a group of registrants. If people registered through a shared link rather than an invitation list, confirm the selection step in the path was actually presented — some path configurations default silently to one category if the selector isn’t required.
The takeaway
Multiple pricing tiers in Cvent aren’t complicated once you treat registration types, fees, and paths as three separate, connected settings rather than one combined step. Set them up in that order, scope any discount codes tightly, and always test as a registrant before you open registration — it’ll save you from having to manually correct pricing on live registrations later.