About Realis
By Carmen Gerea, founder of Realis. Meet the team →
I started noticing the problem while organizing my own events
Every time I've had to organize a workshop, a community meetup or a working session, I run into the same friction over and over: free venues that turn out not to work (no power outlets, no acoustics, no light), hotels that don't reply — or reply late and with a rate that no longer fits the budget I was supposed to close a week ago. And in the middle of all that, local cafés that actually showed up: that said yes, that opened their space without asking for anything complicated in return.
On the other side, working as a consultant and coach with companies in the tourism and hospitality sector, I've seen businesses that want to promote their meeting-room rentals and corporate event services but can't reach their ideal clients.
That kept circling in my head. The goodwill is there. What's missing is the structure to stop wasting time and focus on the actual event — the content and the people who show up.
I travel for work, almost always for workshops and conferences
A large share of my travel in recent years has been for conferences and workshops — not as the exception, but as one of my main reasons to get on a plane. I know the other side of this story as well as the organizing side: landing in a new city and needing, just like everyone else, a place to meet.
The paradox: digital and analog now live side by side
I've worked in digital for over 20 years. I'm, by trade and by habit, hyper-connected. And even so — or maybe precisely because of that — I deeply believe in the human need to meet in person. Not as nostalgia for something we're losing, but as something fundamental to human creativity and even to the economy.
Two forces that seem contradictory are actually pushing each other forward: we're more digitally connected than ever, and we value face-to-face moments more than ever. It's not one or the other. It's both at once, and that intersection is exactly where Realis comes from.
Hotels, cafés and coworkings with little visibility
I've worked in SEO for years — both for search engines and, now, for how AI systems find us — and I understand how marketplaces work from the inside. With those lenses on, what I see is hotels, cafés and coworkings with websites that are nowhere near designed for an event organizer to find them. The supply is there. The demand is there. What's missing is for them to meet, more easily.
And the organizer isn't who you think
The other piece that shifted how I think about this project: today's event organizer isn't a production company or an agency dedicated full-time to organizing events. It's a person with a role — at a company, a community, a network of collaborators — who at some point became the one responsible for bringing the team together. They have no events team, no time, and definitely no patience for getting quotes from ten different places for something that should take fifteen minutes.
This is what I'm building for: the organizers, the people running incredible venues that deserve visibility, and the people who attend in-person events and deserve to be in well-designed, fit-for-purpose spaces.