Boise app company looks for partnership with hotels

Guests place their votes at Feast, a pitch competition for artists. RelEVENT’s event recommendation app allows users to see what film, art, sport, music, food and business events are going on nearby. File photo.

RelEVENT, an app that recommends events to users based on their preferences, is preparing to partner with hotels seeking to replace or augment their concierge services.

“We have been having conversations with hotels across the region, working on taking our app and building a plugin for their website,” said CEO Stacey Donohue, who founded RelEVENT with Chief Technology Officer Sean MacLachlan and former Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Heath.  “A lot of hotels we have talked to have an events page already, but it is a manual process where an employee has to update it.”

The company’s founders work for equity and all work second jobs to support themselves. Heath left his position in January in order to focus on his other business, Business Interiors, and Donohue took over marketing. RelEVENT is now seeking to hire another chief marketing officer, Donohue said.

Stacey Donohue

RelEVENT plans to hire someone who can dedicate about 20 hours a week to blogging and managing emails and social media accounts, but the big push for the company’s marketing effort will be forming hotel partnerships.

RelEVENT is talking to several hotels to see if they can put the app on their websites to help guests find events happening around town.  The ReleVENT plugin is expected to be available for hotels in July. Once the app is on the hotel website, RelEVENT will collect data on the type of events hotel guests click on and use its recommendation system to target that hotel’s clientele, Donohue said.

RelEVENT has funded the development of its app with investments from George Johnson, senior managing director at Weobly One Capital, and Tony Hauser, founder of Novel Projects (Booklamp) and Idaho Asset Management Trust, over the last two years, but is looking for a way to generate its own revenue now that it launched nationwide in September.