The Experience Economy's Biggest Gap: Tools Built for Small Operators

01 /The Concept

Holdbar's pitch is simple: "one tool that's enough to sell experiences."

"Experiences" as a commercial category means the customer isn't buying a physical object – they're buying what happens to them: the feelings, memories, and moments generated by an activity.

Travel is the obvious example – people go places specifically for the experience. But the category extends much further: wineries, adventure hotels, sailing tours, river cruises, museums, fitness retreats, cooking classes, wellness studios. If you can't put it in a box, it probably qualifies.

Holdbar offers these operators an all-in-one platform: a website to describe and showcase their offerings, booking and payment tools (including gift purchases), a built-in CRM for managing reservations and customer communication, and marketing tools for working the accumulated database of registered users.

The free tier takes a 3.5% commission with a booking cap. Paid plans at €49 and €119/month offer unlimited bookings and reduce commissions to 1.8–2%.

Holdbar is a Danish startup. It just closed $3.5M in new funding, and revealed it had previously raised $1M to get the platform off the ground.

02 /Why It Matters

The platform itself isn't flashy – so the question worth asking is: what made investors write the check? As usual, the answer is the market.

Travel – the largest single segment of the experience economy – is recovering aggressively post-pandemic. The global market hit $850 billion in 2023, already surpassing pre-pandemic levels of $750–780 billion. And the underlying structural trend points the same direction: within total consumer spending, the share going to physical goods is declining steadily, while the share going to experiences – travel, entertainment, events – is rising just as steadily. The pandemic created a visible dip, but it didn't change the trajectory.

The real opportunity Holdbar is targeting isn't the large players – it's the long tail. Euromonitor estimates consumers spend $1.1 trillion annually on non-travel experiences, on top of $239 billion spent by tourists on tours and entertainment. The overwhelming majority of vendors serving that demand are small regional operators whose businesses are poorly digitized. By most measures, the experience economy is years behind other retail categories in digital adoption.

Those operators – the wine tour company, the kayak outfitter, the pottery class studio – are the ones Holdbar is selling to. Their sales are growing 5–7% annually. They're using a patchwork of disconnected tools. Holdbar wants to replace all of it.

The 2023–2024 buildout covers the basics: website tools, booking and payment infrastructure for both direct sales and distribution through tour aggregators, and ad performance analytics.

From 2025, the roadmap gets more ambitious: AI-assisted creative and marketing materials, automated ad placement, a full rapid-site-builder, a complete analytics suite, dynamic pricing, insurance and financial products for buyers, and the ability to access financing for business growth.

The early traction is notable: 50 customers already signed, with a 50% conversion rate from prospect outreach. The team believes that once they hit critical mass in a given geography, word-of-mouth will carry acquisition from there – the strategy is to seed 50–100 customers per city through direct sales, then let network effects take over. The initial European push starts in Scandinavia.

One investor framed it well: "Holdbar wants to do for experience sellers what Shopify did for e-commerce" – give small operators a platform powerful enough to thrive independently of marketplace intermediaries.

Similar platforms exist. Easol, [covered in late 2021](/review/prodavcy-vpechatlenij), has raised $29.6M. Bandwango, [covered in 2022](/review/kak-nazhat-na-administrativnyj-rychag), raised $9.2M targeting regional operators specifically, with a pitch around driving tourist traffic and supporting local economies.

03 /Opportunities

One direction flows directly from Holdbar's argument: there's a clear opportunity in building simple but comprehensive platforms for experience sellers, especially targeting small regional operators in tourist-heavy geographies.

The broader angle: The experience market is just one example of a pattern that appears across many industries: a huge number of small businesses remain poorly digitized, even in 2024. Despite assumptions that "everyone already has this"

A few examples of startups already moving in this direction:

Durable, [covered late last year](/review/dumaete-u-vseh-jeto-uzhe-est-oshibaetes), built an AI-powered rapid website builder explicitly targeting small businesses that have been operating for years but have little or no online presence – repair shops, plumbers, personal trainers, landscapers, freelancers. The founder claims 6 million sites were created in the first year – many as quick experiments, but the demand signal is real. The site builder is just the entry point; the platform is expanding into CRM, marketing, blogging, accounting, and full "all-in-one" functionality. Durable has raised $20.25M.

Owner.com, [reviewed about ten days ago](/review/dengi-pojavjatsja-mezhdu-otnjat-i-podelit), built a platform for independent restaurants to run their own online ordering and delivery. It started as a website builder but frames itself as a full marketing team for restaurant owners. The focus is specifically on small restaurant operators who are frustrated with their dependence on third-party delivery aggregators – the same dynamic that makes Shopify compelling to retailers trying to escape marketplace lock-in. Owner.com has raised $62.2M.

The pattern is consistent: build simple but comprehensive platforms for underdigitized small businesses who also want independence from marketplaces. There are still a lot of them. Move now and you can shape the market to your advantage.