Playeasy Launches Hotel Booking Tool

Playeasy has added a new feature on its platform aimed at providing destinations a way to capture room nights booked at events outside a room block, after a room block has expired, or where there is no room block at all. The move comes in response to data on the site and feedback showing that 75 percent of event attendees register or purchase tickets within 30 days of an event’s start date, said Sean Flaherty, co-founder and chief executive officer of Playeasy, making it challenging to capture the complete economic impact.

Destinations have noted that certain type of events, such as established youth sports tournaments, typically leverage third-party booking systems that can track these bookings accurately, Flaherty said. But other types of events lack those tools, leaving a gap in capturing comprehensive data across the portfolio of events that a destination hosts each year.

Problem areas have included collegiate, professional and high school championships that are ticketed, where travel decisions are made close to the event; qualifying events where teams have to qualify a few weeks out from an event; individual participatory events such as marathons or fishing competitions that attract individual visitors; or large, established recurring events in a market that may not have hotel room blocks since rooms typically fill up at a full-price rate.

With the platform’s new tool, destinations will have the option to showcase their local hotels and attraction profiles on their destination profiles and event microsites. Hotel properties in those destinations will then be able to post live rates and availability pulled from more than 40 online booking engines, GDS systems and exclusive discounted rates that aren’t available to the public. Under the program, Playeasy will automatically show the lowest rate available across all of those platforms for each of the hotels for those wanting to book through the site. When participants book through the platform, the destination will be able to more accurately track who is staying where, he said.

“We think it’s a really big solution,” he said.

The program, Flaherty said, will allow destinations to have real-time access to the exact booking data for each event and hotel, as well as reporting across the entire destination to show the hotel pick-up across all events and properties in their market for a truer sense of economic impact.

Among the options for destinations will be to show hotel specials only, hotel specials and live rates, hotel specials that can switch to live rates after a room block expires, or the ability to highlight a select fewer number of preferred hotels with live rates.