Online site Zerve wants to add verve to leisure time

Online service Zerve aims to be your event planner for spur-of-the-moment date nights and upcoming tourist events for visiting friends and relatives.

For more than a decade the New York-based business has been busy providing software to make it easy for experience-based merchants – tour companies, cooking workshops and fishing charters – to connect with online customers.

Now, Zerve is making a more public play, with a new consumer website launching Monday that's optimized for mobile devices. It's meant to take leisure time and entertaining a step beyond restaurant reservation sites such as OpenTable and review sites such as Yelp.

Zerve's new makeover is meant to make it easy for consumers in 32 cities — from New York City to Los Angeles — to find something fun to do beyond the ordinary dinner or a movie, says company founder and executive chairman Scott Newman.

"We think it's really super-cool that at the same time you find can a table to eat at you could also find out that one block away from that there's actually a guided sushi tasting led by an instructor who is teaching you about the evolution of sushi while you taste seven different sushi courses," he says.

Zerve got its start in 2003 in New York providing local entrepreneurs online tools for their websites to let customers book services, be it an art gallery or historic tour, a food tasting or on a sailing cruise. Zerve handles telephones calls and other customer services, too; for its business customers it gets a percentage of sales.

Classic Harbor Line, which has began using Zerve about a decade ago, has grown from its New York charter service to additional sites in Boston, Key West, and Newport, R.I. "I'm sure we would not have expanded the way we have without them," says managing member Rick Scarano. "They were an integral part of our success."

Most customers found Classic Harbor Lines and other events via traditional Web searches. When they wanted to book a spot, they would be sent to a Zerve-run website.

Now, Zerve can direct customers to its merchants, too. "Zerve has a lot of cool, unique things that go on in the city and I would check out what they have," says Collier Wimmer, a High Point (N.C.) University senior who spent the past summer interning in New York and used Zerve's beta test site. "If I had a week or two to go back, I would definitely check out Zerve because they always have new things going on."

That's what Zerve's Newman likes to hear. He has high hopes for the company. "A few years from now we want everyone on the planet when they wake up to go to (their) device," he says, "and look to Zerve to figure out how to spend their free moments that day."