Ben Powers was working as a wedding DJ when he began asking questions about the photographer. How much did the photographer earn? How much equipment did he have to carry? Powers liked the answers. A camera began to look like a rather sensible alternative to hauling a party around in boxes.
It is an appropriately practical opening for a career that would eventually involve 3D media, international hotel groups and a software company. The wedding supplied more than one business opportunity. First there were photographs to take. Then there were venues to own and manage. Finally there was the problem of persuading someone to book a space they could not yet picture.
That last problem became Visiting Media. Powers founded the company, developed its TrueTour immersive selling software and helped introduce SalesHub, a broader platform for hospitality sales teams. In November 2024, he moved from Chief Executive Officer to Chief Innovation Officer. The job title changed. The familiar question remained: what would make this easier for the person trying to sell the room?
A place can be difficult to explain
A hotel sells something unusually awkward to put in a shopping basket. The customer is buying a future stay, or a gathering, inside a physical space. A photograph can show the furniture. A floor plan can give the dimensions. Neither necessarily answers the small, consequential questions that accumulate before a decision: how do these rooms connect? What does the terrace feel like? Can I imagine my event here?
Powers came to those questions as an operator. Before Visiting Media, he had invested in wedding and event facilities and worked on selling them. The difficulty was close at hand. A prospective customer might be comparing several venues, trying to understand the offer through pictures, emails and conversations. The seller knew the property intimately. The buyer was assembling it from fragments.
A photographer named Ben Kaplan brought him an unexpected way to close that gap. Kaplan demonstrated Google Street View-style imagery. Powers remembers the sensation of looking around a place from somewhere else. The experience stayed with him. Here was an image that gave a viewer some control over what to see, rather than asking them to accept the photographer’s selected angle.
The commercial question came immediately after the visual surprise. Where would that experience help a salesperson? Powers experimented with using immersive content inside particular stages of a sales conversation and kept notes on the results. A tour parked on a website was one possibility. An image delivered when a customer needed to understand a particular space suggested many more.
The camera led him to the venue
By June 2023, when Visiting Media announced his appointment as CEO, his biography credited him with launching and growing more than six ventures. The earlier businesses matter because they help explain the direction of his interests. He had spent years working around the occasions, suppliers and buildings that make an event possible. Software arrived after experience with the business it was meant to serve.
He studied at Santa Clara University, spending one year on economics before leaving and returning to Oregon. The educational arrangement that followed had a somewhat less predictable fee structure. As he put it, “my tuition just became all the mistakes I made.” It is an economical description of learning while responsible for the consequences.
The career also followed a useful chain of demand. Wedding photographers need weddings. Weddings need facilities. Facilities need customers who can understand why one venue suits them better than another. Moving along that chain gave Powers a series of related problems to work on. Each business made another part of the same customer decision visible.
That background helps explain the way Visiting Media describes its purpose: making selling spaces and experiences simpler for hospitality. The emphasis falls on an action someone needs to complete. Immersive media supplies information about the place. Software puts that information into the hands of the people who need to use it.
“It’s all about making selling simple and easy.”Ben Powers
A tour needs somewhere to go
TrueTour established the company’s place in immersive selling. Powers’s speaker biography for an HSMAI Los Angeles workshop credits the product with a Travel Portland innovation award and lists customers across hotel brands including Hilton, Marriott, IHG, Kimpton and Accor. His speaking engagements took him into hospitality, property and destination-marketing circles, where the same visual problem could appear in different forms.
He also spoke to people selling private events and club facilities. In 2019, Visiting Media introduced him to the Association of Club Catering and Event Professionals as its VP of Sales. It is a useful detail in a founder’s history. His work included explaining the product to the very people who would have to decide whether it helped them.
For those sellers, a tour must survive the journey out of a demonstration and into daily work. It needs to appear in a proposal, support a conversation, or help a customer examine a room. The technology can be interesting and still require a good deal of explanation. Powers’s background gave him a reason to pay attention to that last stretch.
SalesHub, unveiled in April 2024 while he was CEO, widened the company’s answer. It combined immersive assets with traditional sales material and added digital asset management and distribution capabilities. A hotel could assemble a presentation around the customer’s needs, using familiar content alongside views of the actual space. The company deliberately gave the platform a distinct identity from TrueTour.
There is a quietly demanding management problem underneath that idea. A property has many spaces and many ways of selling them. Its content may be used by people on site, by regional teams and by colleagues working across a portfolio. Keeping assets organized and current becomes part of selling well. The person answering a customer needs confidence in what they are sending.
The SalesHub announcement addressed that administrative work as well as presentation. Its tools were intended for teams both at the property and above it. This is the less photogenic side of immersive media: distributing the content, making updates manageable and helping several people use the same material. A lovely view of the ballroom still needs a reliable route to the buyer.
The founder hands over the CEO desk
Powers became CEO in June 2023 after serving as Senior Vice President of Sales for Visiting Media’s Hotel and Resort division. The appointment brought a founder with direct sales experience into responsibility for the wider company. He had built businesses before. Leading this one required another set of skills, alongside the product questions that already occupied him.
His public account of leadership is candid. He has said that managing people is an area where he wants to improve. That admission gives the founder story some welcome proportion. Knowing what a product should do and helping an organization do its work are related tasks, but they demand different habits. Experience in one does not settle every question in the other.
In November 2024, the company created the Chief Innovation Officer position for him. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, previously its Chief Operating Officer, became CEO. The announcement gave Powers continued involvement with the sales organization and a focus on product vision informed by customer insights. It was a change in the division of work between two people already inside the business.
Following his role leading sales for the Hotel and Resort division.
The company broadens its hospitality sales platform.
Powers moves closer to product vision and customer-informed development.
The new remit fits the public description of how he likes to work: growing the company, staying close to customers and bringing technologies into the industry. Product invention still requires contact with the seller’s day. A conversation about a difficult proposal may reveal something that a demonstration misses. The founder’s sales background remains relevant to that work.
He continued appearing alongside colleagues and customers after the transition. In April 2025, Powers joined the Visiting Media team at the Pyramid Leadership Conference in La Quinta, California. The company’s account describes conversations with existing and prospective customers. The innovation role still involved going where the people using the product gathered.
A notebook in Carlton, a platform abroad
Powers’s current company biography identifies him as Founder and Chief Innovation Officer and describes a platform serving thousands of properties globally. His own account places his home in Carlton, Oregon. A business can have a wide reach while its founder’s thinking begins in a particular place, with familiar surroundings and a task that can still be written down.
His workshop biography supplies a few less corporate details. He plays piano in a band and owns a Pinot Noir vineyard. He is also a pilot. The mixture gives the profile something a row of executive appointments cannot: activities that involve making, practicing and paying attention, away from the software demonstration.
For product ideas, he describes mornings with coffee and yellow legal pads. Most ideas are thrown away before they leave the notebook; many more are discarded after reaching the product team. His particular enthusiasm is distribution, the question of getting content to the places where it can help. The notebook and the network are separated by a considerable amount of rejection.
That detail makes the career feel less like a sequence of announcements and more like ongoing work. A photographer learns what an image can convey. A venue operator learns what the customer still needs explained. A software founder tries to connect the two. Powers keeps returning to the distance between knowing a place and helping someone else understand it. There is usually another page on the pad.