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:

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:

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.

Oxto has 19K+ active users who come to it specifically to find wine, food, and hospitality experiences, alongside 800+ wineries across 45+ regions. The idea is to turn that audience 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.

For an independent host, Oxto is free to list and charges 3% per paid ticket, or 1.5% on the $29 a month plan and 0% on the $299 a year plan. Luma is free with a 5% fee, or 0% at $708 a year. Posh sets its fee at checkout and does not publish a fixed rate; third-party 2026 reports put it near 10% plus $0.99 a ticket. Eventbrite charges 3.7% plus $1.79 a ticket. Tock/Resy (Tock moved onto Resy, American Express’s restaurant-first app, in August 2026) and CellarPass start at $229 to $289 a month plus 2% to 3%, with no free reservation tier. Card processing is extra on all of them; on Oxto it is charged by Stripe at its standard rate, currently 2.9% plus 30 cents per paid ticket.

On $5,000 in ticket sales (100 tickets at $50), here is what each platform keeps in platform fees before card processing:

What each platform actually charges, plainly:

• Oxto: free to join and list. 3% Oxto fee per paid ticket sold, or Oxto Reserve at $29 a month (1.5% per ticket) or $299 a year (no per-ticket Oxto fee). Stripe card processing, currently 2.9% plus 30 cents, applies to paid tickets. Free events are free. Takes seated reservations and ticketed events, keeps a taste profile on every guest, and lists you next to wineries in taste-matched discovery with the Oxto AI assistant and AI search.
• Luma: free plan with a 5% platform fee on paid tickets and free events free. Luma Plus removes the fee for $59 a month billed annually ($708 a year). Events only, no seated reservations.
• Posh: free to publish, no monthly fee. Posh does not publish a fixed rate; its fee is set at checkout and shown all-in, and third-party 2026 reports put it near 10% plus $0.99 a ticket with card processing included in that figure. Built for nightlife and music. Events only.
• Eventbrite: free events free. Paid tickets carry 3.7% plus $1.79 per ticket and 2.9% payment processing per order, passed to the buyer by default. The largest general event marketplace. Events only.
• Tock/Resy and CellarPass: venue reservation platforms with no free reservation tier. Tock Essential is $289 a month plus 3% on prepayments. CellarPass Professional is $229 a month plus 2%, and CellarPass Enterprise is $799 a month with no reservation fee. Neither lists independent hosts.

Included and Not offered reflect each company’s public pricing and feature pages as of September 2026 and our reading of them. Company names are trademarks of their owners. Capabilities change; if you spot an error, tell us and we will fix it.

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:

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.