Hostelworld – the Irish-founded accommodation booking portal – has acquired OccasionGenius, a US-based B2B event discovery platform, for $12m.
This strategic acquisition marks a significant step forward in Hostelworld’s ambition to build the world’s leading social travel platform, as outlined at its investor/capital markets day back in April.
OccasionGenius empowers businesses to inspire their audiences with a global event dataset delivered via API, comprising a rich, city-by-city catalogue of local ‘Things to Do’ and a unique global dataset of ‘travel worthy’ events that inspire travellers to book trips.
The company addresses the critical need for accurate, large-scale event information. Its unique, technology-based aggregation capabilities, supplemented with a human-curated approach, ensure details such as venues, dates, and times are reliable. This factual data is then enriched with inspirational descriptions, rights-cleared imagery, and extensive event metadata to create a comprehensive, marketing-ready content asset for their blue-chip clients.
OccasionGenius is growing rapidly with forecasted annualised recurring revenue of €1.5m, by year end.
Hostelworld CEO Gary Morrison said: “This acquisition allows us to immediately supercharge our platform with a wealth of content that would take us years to build organically and enhances value creation opportunities for our shareholders.”
“The acquisition of OccasionGenius is a significant development which positions Hostelworld as the first social travel platform with an integrated offering of social networking, event discovery and accommodation. This acquisition allows us to immediately supercharge our platform with a wealth of content that would take us years to build organically and enhances value creation opportunities for our shareholders,” Mr Morrison added.
Hostelworld’s strategic rationale for the acquisition is based on three key pillars:
- Enhances our Social Travel Platform: By integrating a rich catalogue of local events, we give travellers more reasons to connect and explore together, creating an unrivalled platform to find not only a place to stay and people to meet, but also unforgettable things to do.
- Accelerates our Growth and Monetisation: By showcasing major ‘travel worthy’ events, we can inspire new trips entirely, capturing travellers at the very beginning of their planning journey and driving growth in social members and bookings.
- Creates a Unique Proprietary Data Asset: By combining our Social Graph and bookings data with this new layer of global event data, we are building a powerful, long-term strategic asset that will provide unique insights into traveller behaviour and drive future growth.
Hostelworld said: “The acquisition represents a natural progression of our growth strategy outlined at the Capital Markets Day in April 2025. It builds on the success of our social strategy, reinforcing our ambition to create the world’s leading social travel platform. The acquisition accelerates the development of our events capability, giving us immediate access to structured, global event data; content that would otherwise take years to build organically. By integrating this at scale, we expand from accommodation into events, strengthen community connection, and advance our broader social monetisation strategy.”
