Easol Is A SAAS Product Helping Event Creators Sell Tickets And Travel

As the world has recently seen with fans traveling all over the world to see Taylor Swift, there are more steps than buying a ticket when you want to go to a show. It’s flights, lodging, transfers and what else you may as well do as you’re already somewhere new. This was once the provenance of a travel agent. But now the details are left in the hands of the consumer who has to navigate a variety of vendors to assemble a trip.

Easol is an all-in-one online software platform, originally built when Co-Founders Lisa and Ben Simpson became frustrated trying to grow their own experience business. They experienced huge operational challenges from using up to six different tools to operate the festival. This left Lisa and Ben with a challenge to stay on top of core elements of their business from their brand to finances and data. They built additional capacity into Easol and positioned themselves to be Software As A Service which they provided to event creators. Easol is now a vital resource for event creators combining website functionality, booking systems and payment infrastructure while allowing full customization and control over customer relationships.

Consumers create an adventure away from home with all of the individual elements of the travel experience. So, if you like me had a two night trip to Denver for a meeting, a dinner and then the next day with the Rolling Stones. And, if you followed that up with two more nights in Vail, 100 miles away through the mountains. And if there you had to book rooms, dinners, golf and other events. It’s a lot of work. That’s four nights in two locations, transportation to and from two separate airports as well as the 100 mile drive up into the mountains. The concert, the dinners, golf and all the other ancillary activities have to been coordinated and arranged. That’s quite the project to assemble. This is the challenge Easol works tirelessly to resolve by expanding the capacity of their software platform.

I spoke to Easol founders Lisa and Ben Simpson. They described how their original plan was to provide technology powering creators on their own ticketing sites for local events such as races, ski weekends and small music festivals and more. Ben and Lisa observed that people who bought a ticket to a weekend event built around wellness, bicycling or running still needed to purchase travel elements. For those purchases the customers left the experience creator’s website and went elsewhere. But, what if Easol could power experience creators to integrate all the pieces themselves and sell directly to their own community? Why wouldn’t Easol integrate the capacity for a customers to book the travel, lodging, transfers and access to whatever else their customer might like to do once they arrived on the creator’s site.

If the customer stayed within the creator’s ecosystem then Easol as a SAAS product could power aggregated everyone going to an event and help the event creator provide access to all of their necessary travel elements from a single point of sale and likely at a lower price than shopping for each piece independently.

One of the most interesting choices made by Lisa and Ben was to silo the data gathered from customers at the organizer level. In a world in which data is key, leaving the customer information to the event organizer is a truly smart choice. It builds trust with event organizers who are secure knowing that Easol cannot later compete for their customers because the key data is not on their servers.

Lisa and Ben’s insight about integrating the entire travel experience along with providing secure access to the events on sale helped Easol accelerate growth. And, grow they did and continue. They have recently partnered with several prominent U.S. based creators, including Splash House and Goldenvoice presents Desert Air which return to Palm Springs in November. Tyler McLean, the founder of Splash House said: “The Easol platform offers us greater flexibility for selling our experience, and with more control over our fees, customer journey and data. We now have new opportunities to grow our revenue.”

EasolEasol – Sell travel and experiences online.

One of the great challenges of selling in the internet age is to build a relationship with consumers so that they come back rather than just using whatever site pops up after a search engine inquiry. Easol’s strategy of providing event creators their own acomplete solution as a SAAS product for away events differentiates it from virtually every other ticket selling entity. It creates a much larger universe of add on sales for experience creators to create new revenue streams and be in full control over every aspect of their business. Easol’s technology when used by event creators made the process of building the travel and event elements much less fraught for their consumers.

In the course of looking at Easol, it became obvious just how big their potential is for ticketed events beyond concerts. There are events globally beyond performance which are essentially any gathering to which people come. The organizer of these events can focus on creating the experience, and they can delegate to Easol selling the tickets and providing access through their platform to arrange all necessary travel. For Easol that means a lot of revenue streams aggregated into a single package sale. For the consumer it means a lot less aggravation seeking lodging or transportation as all resources are centralized and with less risk of price gouging. Easol has the capacity to make certain external vendors deliver the pieces which create a comprehensive and fairly priced bundle for transportation, lodging or add-on experiences beyond the event itself.

Easol continues to expand. At present they have approximately 80 people on staff, mostly in the U.K. They are currently operating in 136 countries from the U.K. and from their New York office. The 2025 plan includes opening an office in Los Angeles as they continue to expand. Lisa and Ben remain true to their core value which is “creator first.” They believe every decision they make should be in the best interest of the event creators. And, that simple core value is key to holding relationships with the creators who put on the events globally.

Creators build an attractive events, whether athletic, cultural, music or any other sort of gathering. They bring on Easol to handle the complex task of selling the event tickets, providing the technology for those planning to attend to make all necessary travel arrangements and remain secure that the data from all of this remains in the creator’s control.

Because of the scale at which Easol now operates, they can be more price efficient than any individual promoter could expect to achieve. It is an interdependent relationship in which the attendee, promoter and Easol all wind up better together than if they had acted separately. Sometimes when you ask for less, you wind up with more. In this case, the trust which has developed between event organizers and Easol has powered them to where they handle millions of transactions from events in almost every country around the globe. That’s a pretty good start. What happens next should be fascinating.