Visiting
Media.

A sales director closes a $400,000 booking without leaving her desk

It's a Tuesday. A meeting planner in Chicago needs a resort ballroom in Cancún for 600 people. The old script said: schedule a site visit, book the flights, lose two weeks. Instead, the hotel's sales director sends a link. The planner walks the ballroom in 360, drops into the foyer, checks the sightlines from the head table, and signs. Nobody boarded a plane.

That link was built on Visiting Media - a hospitality technology and immersive-content company whose software is now used by Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG to sell the one thing hotels have always struggled to sell remotely: the space itself.

Fig 1. The whole pitch, compressed into a hyperlink. The travel industry's least glamorous innovation is also its most useful.

You cannot email a room

Hospitality is a visual business sold with non-visual tools. For decades, the multimillion-dollar group booking - the wedding, the conference, the incentive trip - hinged on a glossy PDF, a folder of flattering photos, and a buyer's leap of faith. The gap between what a property actually felt like and what a buyer could see before arriving was enormous. And expensive.

Visiting Media's founders knew the gap personally. They weren't engineers. They owned independent event and wedding venues in the Pacific Northwest, and they couldn't find decent technology to sell their own spaces. The available tools treated a grand ballroom like a line item.

Consider the stakes. A single corporate conference or destination wedding can be worth six figures to a property. Those deals are won and lost on whether a buyer can picture the event - the light through the windows at 4pm, the walk from the lobby to the foyer, whether 600 people will feel crowded or comfortable. A flat photo flatters. It also lies by omission. And the buyer, sensing this, hedges: more site visits, longer sales cycles, more deals that stall in the maybe pile. The cost of "you can't really see it from here" was baked into every line of the hospitality P&L.

Fig 2. The hospitality sales deck, circa forever: beautiful photos that conveniently leave out the parking lot.

Venue owners who got tired of waiting for better software

So they built it. Founder Ben Powers pulled together local engineers and photographers and shipped the first version of an app called TrueTour around 2014. The bet was simple and slightly stubborn: if you could capture a property completely - every angle, every room, in high enough fidelity - a buyer would trust what they saw enough to sign. The site visit wouldn't disappear, but it would stop being the gatekeeper.

The bet got tested hard in 2020. When COVID grounded in-person inspections entirely, Visiting Media leaned into CGI - rendering rooms that buyers physically could not visit. A constraint that should have killed an immersive-tour company instead proved why it existed.

Fig 3. Ben Powers, who started as a guy with a venue and a complaint, now sits as Chief Innovation Officer.

Capture the whole property. Then sell it from anywhere.

The core platform, TrueTour, stitches 360 video, spherical imaging, 3D models, dollhouse views, and clickable hotspots into a single interactive experience a salesperson can share, personalize, and - crucially - measure. That last word matters more than it sounds. When a buyer opens a TrueTour link, the seller learns what they looked at, how long they lingered, and where they clicked away. The folder of PDFs never told anyone that. A virtual tour that reports back turns a brochure into a sales signal.

In April 2024 the company shipped SalesHub, billed as the first sales enablement platform built specifically for hospitality, adding digital asset management, multi-channel distribution, and engagement analytics on top of the familiar TrueTour interface. The distinction is deliberate: generic sales enablement software assumes you're selling a product that fits in a box. Hospitality sells a place, on a date, for a crowd - and the tooling, until recently, pretended otherwise.

Fig 4. Four products, one job: make a buyer feel like they're standing in a room they've never entered.

The customers are the kind that read every contract twice

Skeptics should look at the logos. Visiting Media's platforms are in use across Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, Aimbridge Hospitality, and Host Hotels & Resorts - organizations that do not adopt sales software because a demo looked nice. These are companies with procurement teams, security reviews, and a healthy allergy to vendor hype. The company reports more than 3,200 customers globally, and on Hotel Tech Report it carries a 4.8-of-5 rating across 226 verified hotelier reviews, with 97% saying they'd recommend it.

Ratings are easy to game once; they're hard to fake across hundreds of properties that renew year after year. The scores worth noticing aren't the headline 4.8 - they're customer support at 4.8 and ROI at 4.6. Software that wins on support and return, not just on a slick first impression, tends to be software people actually keep. The 2023 growth investment from JMI Equity, a firm that specializes in software companies past the prove-it stage, reads as a bet on exactly that durability.

Fig 5. Numbers that survive a procurement department. The rare hotel tech that gets renewed, not just bought.

Deliver the most effective sales tools hotels have ever had

The stated goal is unglamorous and exact: build the world's most effective sales tools for hotels and resorts. In late 2024 the company handed the wheel to Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, a CEO who previously held senior roles at Microsoft and Mozilla and who talks openly about pairing immersive selling with AI and customer data. Founder Ben Powers stepped into the Chief Innovation Officer role - a way to keep the original obsession in the building while bringing in someone who's scaled global software before.

Fig 6. The handoff: founder to innovation chief, operator to CEO. A quieter transition than most.

Back to that Tuesday

The Cancún booking closed because the planner trusted a screen as much as she'd trust her own eyes. That's the shift Visiting Media is selling, one ballroom at a time. With Spazious and FirstView folded in - adding 3D event diagramming and instant-booking workflows across the US, Europe, and Latin America - the company is no longer just showing the room. It's letting a buyer lay out the tables, see the workflow, and reserve the space, all from the same link.

The site visit isn't dead. It's just no longer the thing standing between a hotel and a signature. The pitch that used to need a plane ticket now needs a browser tab - and the hotels selling the biggest spaces in the world are betting that's exactly where the next decade of hospitality sales happens.

See it move

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