How Wine Hosts, Sommeliers, Chefs, and Hospitality Operators Can Use Oxto

Think about how you discover a great wine dinner today. Maybe you follow the restaurant on Instagram. Maybe the sommelier posts about it. Maybe you happen to be on the winery’s mailing list. Maybe a friend sends it to you. Maybe you walk into a wine shop and see a flyer.

If none of those things happen, you probably never know the event existed. That is bizarre when you compare hospitality with almost every other category. If I want a hotel, I know where to search. If I want a restaurant reservation, I know where to search. If I want a concert, I know where to search. But if I want to know:

What interesting wine experiences are happening in New York this weekend?

There has historically been no obvious answer. Oxto is trying to change that.

Oxto allows hosts and operators to create profiles and showcase the experiences they offer. That includes people and businesses such as:

• Sommeliers
• Private chefs
• Wine educators
• Restaurants
• Wine shops
• Wine clubs
• Event hosts
• Tasting companies
• Hospitality creators
• Wineries
• Independent wine professionals

A host can use their profile to explain who they are, what they offer, and what makes their experiences different. They can then list experiences and events directly through the platform.

Instead of forcing potential customers to piece together what you do from an Instagram bio, a Linktree, a Google Form, and several posts, Oxto gives the business an actual destination.

A surprising number of small hospitality businesses still operate through Instagram DMs. Someone messages:

Do you have anything available Saturday?

The host responds. Then they go back and forth on timing. Then someone sends a Venmo link. Then somebody forgets whether the reservation was confirmed. That might work when you have five customers. It gets significantly harder when you are trying to build a real business.

At the same time, many existing reservation systems were designed for restaurants, hotels, or much larger operators. They can be too expensive, too complicated, or simply not designed for the way independent hosts work.

Oxto provides a much lighter infrastructure for hosts who need to showcase availability and accept reservations without building an entire technology stack themselves.

A host’s Oxto profile can become the central place where someone understands their business. A customer should be able to see:

• Who are you?
• What kinds of experiences do you host?
• What events do you have coming up?
• Can I book a private tasting?
• What does it cost?
• Where are you located?
• What should I expect?

That sounds obvious, but for many independent hospitality businesses today, those answers are scattered across several different platforms. Oxto brings them together.

Not every hospitality experience happens through a traditional reservation. Some happen as events. A chef may host a six-course wine dinner. A sommelier might organize a Champagne tasting. A winery might take over a restaurant for one evening. A creator might host a 50-person wine event.

Oxto allows those events to live alongside a host’s broader profile and experiences. That means customers discovering a host can see both the things they can book regularly and the special events they have coming up. More importantly, the event is being shown to an audience already interested in wine, food, travel, and hospitality.

Distribution is one of the hardest parts of being an independent host. You can create an incredible event. That does not mean anyone knows it exists. Social media helps, but it is unpredictable. Your followers might see the post. They might not. And the person who would absolutely buy a ticket might have no idea who you are yet.

In Oxto’s first few months, our platform and content have reached nearly 500,000 people. The idea is to turn that distribution into something useful for the businesses creating the experiences. Instead of every host having to independently build an audience from scratch, Oxto creates another channel through which people can discover them.

There is another part of this that I think is particularly interesting. The hospitality industry is incredibly collaborative, but the people within it are surprisingly disconnected.

A sommelier may want to collaborate with a winery. A winery may want a chef for a dinner. A hotel may want a wine educator for an event. A restaurant might want a producer to host a tasting. A chef may want access to wineries looking for events in their city.

Today those partnerships largely happen through personal networks, Instagram, email, and chance. Oxto creates the beginnings of a network connecting those different parts of the hospitality ecosystem. A host should not just be able to find customers. They should eventually be able to find collaborators.

This is particularly important for wineries. Most wineries have historically thought about customer acquisition through a few primary channels: the tasting room, wine club, wholesale, events, email, and social media. But wineries increasingly need ways to reach customers where those customers already live and travel.

A winery in Sonoma might want to host a dinner in New York. A Napa producer might want to collaborate with a Miami sommelier. An Oregon winery might want to host an event with a restaurant in Chicago. A platform connecting wineries with hospitality operators creates an entirely new distribution opportunity.

And for the host, that partnership can create a more compelling experience for their own customers.

There is an emerging class of hospitality entrepreneur that did not really exist at scale a decade ago. The sommelier with a personal following. The chef hosting independent dinners. The wine creator offering private tastings. The hospitality professional building experiences outside of a traditional restaurant or hotel.

Social media made it possible for these people to build audiences. But audience and infrastructure are two different things. Once someone wants to turn that audience into a business, they suddenly need:

• A website
• Scheduling
• Reservations
• Payments
• Ticketing
• Customer communication
• Discovery
• Marketing
• Partnerships

That is a lot of infrastructure for someone who really just wants to create incredible experiences. Oxto is designed to take some of that operational burden away.

We started in wine because wine makes the fragmentation incredibly obvious. Thousands of producers. Thousands of restaurants. Thousands of sommeliers, chefs, creators, shops, hotels, and independent hosts. Millions of consumers interested in experiences. And very little connecting them all together.

Our goal is to build that connective layer. A place where someone can open Oxto and ask:

What are the best wine experiences near me?

And find an answer. A place where a traveler can discover a winery. A place where a local can find a wine dinner. A place where a sommelier can build a bookable business. A place where a chef can sell an event. A place where a winery can reach customers in another city. A place where those people can ultimately find each other.

The future of hospitality is increasingly experiential, independent, and creator-led. The infrastructure behind it should catch up.