Playeasy Live Rate Hotel Solution

Introducing Playeasy’s Event-Based Live Rate Hotel Solution

The Problem:

Understanding the economic impact an event brings a community hinges on one critical piece of data: the number of hotel room nights booked. This metric, while crucial, is surprisingly challenging to pin down, particularly when it comes to sporting events who notoriously register or purchase tickets for an event at the last minute. (According to Playeasy’s Event Analytics data, 75% of event attendees register or purchase tickets within 30 days of the event start date).

This brings us to the #1 problem we consistently hear from our Destination partners: Not being able to track the non-contracted hotel room nights associated with an event. While certain types of events, such as well-established youth sports tournaments, often leverage third-party booking systems that can track these bookings, many other types of events hosted by a destination lack such tools. This leaves a gap in capturing comprehensive data across the portfolio of events a destination hosts each year, which results in inaccurate and under-represented economic impact reporting.

Some common event scenarios where this problem persists:

• Ticketed Events (Collegiate, Professional, High School Championships, etc) to track fans/ attendees booking rooms
• Qualifying Events where teams needed to qualify and only have a couple weeks to plan travel
• Individual Participatory Events like a marathon or fishing competition that attracts individual/ transient visitors
• Large Established Recurring Events in a Market that hotels won’t offer room blocks for because they know they can charge full price and fill their rooms based on the event’s history
• Smaller Events that don’t want to deal with hassle of room blocks or contracting with a 3rd party
• Traditional Sports Tournaments that have late registrants and need a way to capture hotel bookings once their room blocks expire.

The Solution:

Playeasy has had the ability for Destinations to create and showcase Hotels and Local Attraction profiles as part of their Destination Profile and Event Microsites. We are now taking the Hotel functionality to the next level, enabling the ability to connect each of your hotel properties to live rates and availability from over 40 of the most popular online booking engines, GDS systems, and exclusive discounted rates that aren’t available to the public. Playeasy will automatically show the lowest rate available across all of these platforms for each of your hotels.

Destinations can now enable these live hotel rates to be shown on their Playeasy Event Microsites with a single click of a button, as well as have access to advanced settings to set-up the hotels for each unique scenario. When a visitor books a hotel through the Event Microsite it will appear to that hotel as a booking from whatever channel that rate was pulled from (ex: if the rate that was booked came from Expedia, it will show up to the hotel as the booking came from Expedia).  

The best part? Now the destination can have real-time access to the exact booking data for each event and hotel, as well as reporting across the entire Destination that can show the hotel pick-up across all events and properties in their market.  

Check out this event with live hotel rates! 2024 Big Sky Conference Basketball Championships

Everyone’s a Winner

Destinations:

• Control of the hotels listed on event pages to ensure visitors book within their market
• Detailed visibility into non-contracted booking data for each event and each hotel

Event Organizers:

• Non-contracted hotel booking data to represent their event’s full economic impact
• Enhanced participant experience showcasing local attractions & deals nearby the event

Participants:

• Lowest hotel rates available online to help travelers save money on lodging
• Local deals & discounts to save money on experiencing the community & attractions

Hotels:

• Integrates with their existing booking channels with no extra commissions or fees
• Less competition as only the destination’s hotels are listed and no other markets

Here’s a further breakdown of the features and functionality: 

Destinations control the exact hotels that can be booked, ensuring all visitors stay within their market

Lowest rates available online, no extra fees or commissions

Detailed hotel pick-up reporting 

• View detailed reporting on your hotel pick-up for each event, for each hotel, as well as across all of your events and hotels seamlessly 
• Ensuring visitors can book the lowest rates, leading to more trackable bookings which equals more data – data is power 

Flexibility for every scenario

Customize your event effortlessly. Link to third-party systems, showcase live rates, or combine both seamlessly. The choice is yours! Below are some of the flexible options to highlight hotels:

• Hotel Specials Only
  • Market only event room blocks or special hotel rates that can link directly to a hotel’s website or 3^rd party booking system 
• Hotel specials & live rates:
  • Market both side by side
• Hotel specials then switch to live rates after room-blocks expire:
  • Automate the timing of when your event microsite switches from marketing room blocks to live rates
• Market just a few of your preferred event hotels with live rates
  • If you want to just highlight the few hotel partners that are working with you on this event, you can select only those hotels and enable live rates once their room-block rate expires
• Market live rates for all of your hotel partners
  • You can market all of your hotel partners that have availability on the event, which will automatically be sorted by closest distance to the event location, or you can choose to only show your hotel partners that are within a certain mile radius

Contact us if you’d like to learn more! Also sign-up for our webinar on March 14^th at 2PM where we’ll go into further detail of this incredibly powerful new functionality.