When Airbnb introduced “Experiences” as an additional business line in late 2016, it grew thirteen times faster than the original homes business at the same time, CEO Brian Chesky told Fortune last year.
It’s no secret Airbnb’s roaring growth has prompted the hospitality industry to respond. Today, travelers don’t just want to book a room, they also want to know about the local culture, cuisine and thrills around the place where they’re staying.
“Hotels used to offer the same cookie-cutter hotel experience everywhere they built a hotel,” said Nate Marcus, founder and CEO of OccasionGenius. “But now travel is becoming more local and authentic. Guests want to know what locals are doing for fun.”
OccasionGenius, a Richmond-based event technology startup, raised $1.1 million in seed capital earlier this year to build its technology platform that coalesces event data and informs people of things to do around town.
The platform pulls in public data from large event booking sites like Eventbrite and TicketMaster and regional web calendars of local organizations like Startup Virginia and VCU and feeds it through its patent-pending system to personalize it for users.
In Richmond, over 18,000 users have created an “Interest Genome” on OccasionGenius’s site by filling out a 30-second survey about their preferences (e.g. “What looks like fun to you?”). The top five interests at the moment are Boozy, Foody, Concerts & Live Music, Festivals and Day Trips.
Marcus’ background as a globetrotting experiential educator fits his role as CEO. For nine years, he guided people through international adventures and wilderness expeditions across Europe and Asia and observed people staying in new environments.
After earning a culinary certificate from the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York City, Marcus brought his passion for facilitating events to Richmond in 2012 where he took a job as an Iron Chef team-building facilitator at Mise En Place Cooking School.
Here, he saw two groups on different sides of the same recurring problem miss each other. Well-funded corporate event planners asked him, “What is there to do in Richmond? There’s nothing fun.” But he also heard local event organizers saying, “We have this fun event but how do we get the word out to companies with event budgets?”
“The problem wasn’t that Richmond has nothing to do,” Marcus said. Something else was missing. So in 2015, he quit his job and founded a platform for private parties that united the two groups, called PartyRVA.
In the first year, the company brought in $58,000 and helped 80,000 people find events from children's to bachelor parties. Soon, the site became the go-to resource for finding private events in Richmond.
Marcus was accepted into the Richmond startup accelerator Lighthouse Labs in fall 2015, signaling an important pivot for the company and a rebrand.
“I would get phone calls from people saying, ‘Are you selling RVs?’” Marcus said.
The company entered Lighthouse Labs and emerged as OccasionGenius, a startup primed for professional funding and national expansion.
However, in 2017, Marcus took OccasionGenius into stealth mode to develop its AI-based event discovery technology. “We quickly learned that the technology we had built was of intense interest to several B2B verticals,” he said.
OccasionGenius pivoted its model, molted its broad consumer brand and recast itself as a tech platform focused on powering white-labeled enterprise initiatives. The startup recently sold its private event marketplace business to focus more on its B2B pipeline, with a priority on the travel industry.
“Travel companies and OTAs are eager to integrate with our technology,” he said.
For example, OccasionGenius can offer hotel guests a personalized local event guide during and for two days after their stay that would prompt guests to extend their stay. Hotels would then harvest psychographic data about guests through OccasionGenius.
"While we have customers who are real estate agents (10 percent of the Richmond market) and universities (VCU), we're primarily focused on partnering with hotels," Marcus said. OccasionGenius offers five event-based products for hotels, one for each of the five phases of the guest experience: the dream phase, booking, pre-stay, stay and post-stay.
He said he is having conversations around multimillion-dollar contracts with several top hospitality brands.
“We feel like a new company,” Marcus said. “The joy of finding a product-market fit is things start to move very quickly.”
This focus on travel is only the beginning, said Marcus, who laid out a multi-phase roadmap of new developments, from innovations in the dating industry to online search, to real estate. The company has turned down two acquisition offers to date.
OccasionGenius shares personnel and office space with local design and development shop Ameronix. The company is hiring for roles to head up its B2B sales expansion, including a position Marcus called a “Hotel Tsar.”
