AI-native ticketing built for premium events in New York, Miami and London
Daniel Azzopardi is the founder of Rendezvous, an AI-native ticketing and event management platform for creator-led premium experiences. The platform, which has powered over 40 experiences across four continents, is built around the guest experience rather than maximum ticket volume. The story shows how Rendezvous uses AI for routine, off-hour guest support while keeping human-led onboarding to protect the premium service.
Put AI on the repetitive, time-sensitive admin that eats your week – ticket resends, guest messages and plus-one changes – especially overnight, but keep humans for first conversations and any part of the product people are paying for. Consolidate guest data before automating and measure success by whether the guest experience improves.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I spent ten years running operations for marketplaces and delivery businesses, at Rocket Internet, Delivery Hero and others. The idea for Rendezvous came from watching creators run premium events on spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups and ticketing tools built for volume. The software treated a 200-person dinner the same as a 20,000-person festival. So in 2024 we built an AI-native ticketing and event management platform for premium experiences. We’ve powered over 40 experiences across four continents, mostly through networks in New York, Miami and London. Generic platforms are built to sell the maximum number of tickets. We’re built for the guest experience: who’s in the room, how they check in, how the creator communicates with them before and after the event. Our customers are curators. They care who turns up.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Almost all of it is word of mouth inside creator networks. One creator runs an event on the platform, their guests include other creators, and those creators come to us. New York, Miami and London feed each other that way. I’d like more inbound, from search and from guests pushing creators to use us. Referrals are a good sign but they only travel through existing scenes. Inbound would mean the reputation has gone further than our network.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
We handed first-line support to AI. Ticket resends, event details, plus-one changes. Most of it lands between 9pm and 2am, when no support team wants to be awake, and the chatbot deals with the bulk of it. We tried AI on onboarding new creators and went back to doing it by hand. The first conversation is where you learn how their events actually run: door policy, comps, table layouts, the things nobody types into a form. A human call gets that in twenty minutes.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
People arrive better briefed than two years ago. They’ve usually read what the platform does before the first conversation, so questions start further along, pricing and edge cases rather than what we do. A few creators have told us they found us by asking an AI assistant to recommend ticketing tools for premium events. It’s a trickle today. I expect it to grow, because those tools answer with a shortlist and you’re either on it or you don’t exist.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do: pick the two or three admin jobs that eat your team’s week. For us that was guest messages, list reconciliation and post-event follow-up. Put AI on those first. Get your guest data into one place before you start, because AI on top of messy data produces confident mistakes. Then judge it on one question: did the guest experience improve. Ignore anything sold to you as an AI event strategy. Ignore tools you can’t explain to your door staff. And don’t automate what people are paying for. A premium event is humans in a room. The point of the software is to free your team up to be in the room too.
Thank you to Daniel Azzopardi and the team at Rendezvous for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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