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When Alex Brennan, Head of Commercial Sports Where I Am, joined the company, he already had a vision of enabling travelers to easily attend sporting events while abroad.
Founded in 2012 to offer live sporting experience tickets, Sports Where I Am partnered with GetYourGuide early in the company’s journey. Today, it sends more than 10,000 guests per year to sporting events through the platform and is growing 50% year over year.
A huge 98% of their bookings come through OTAs, and that's deliberate. They’ve sunset their direct-to-consumer channel, although they take some incremental agent bookings directly. Their goal is to use technology to make ticketing accessible to the wider travel audience, so they’re not in competition with OTAs for share of business.
“Our mission is to enable the magic of sport for the everyday traveler. So ultimately, we believe that sporting events are a window into a city's true culture, and what we've done is create a means by which to make that easily accessible, easily bookable, and available to all sorts of travelers all over the world through their platform of choice,” says Alex.
We sat down with Alex to delve into how Sports Where I Am collaborates with OTAs like GetYourGuide to grow their business.
Since joining GetYourGuide, what have been the most significant outcomes for your business?
Together, we've actually validated an entire vertical. This hasn’t really been done before, except on a very small level. The live events vertical was the new darling of the industry, and it was going to take some bold moves to unlock it and test it to see if it could work.
So, for us to actually see this work at scale, doing thousands of tickets a month through GetYourGuide alone for sporting events, it's validated an entire live events vertical for the travel industry, which I'm personally really proud of. I think that permeates in many different ways.
We’ve attracted the attention of leagues and major sports teams who now work with us. We’ve engaged destination marketing organizations that can see the value of using sport as a hook in their destination, and are looking to leverage that even more. So, it's been a really positive exercise.
How do you collaborate with OTAs like GetYourGuide?
Our highest touchpoint is with our account managers and regional leads. We have a great key account manager based in the US. He is always really flexible and works with us in a way that is supportive and collaborative.
We also have a large number of touchpoints with GetYourGuide’s connectivity team. We're working not only on direct connections, but also, given that our product proposition is rather unique in the travel ecosystem, we work closely with that team to try to bend and twist sports tickets into an experiences ecosystem that continues to improve the user experience.
I would definitely say that, with the customer service team, it never feels like you're getting a canned response or an automated piece of communication. If a customer has questions that are surfaced through the customer service team, we're able to work with them in a really smooth way, and that means a lot to us, because that's not common in this kind of environment.
Were there any initial hesitations with working with GetYourGuide, and ultimately, what convinced you to move forward?
There are certain nuances with the product we have that are not common in the tourism activities ecosystem. We knew we would have to make a case to anyone we worked with to be flexible about some of these nuances. That could be the kind of cancellation policy or how ticket delivery works.
That meant any OTAs we worked with had to believe in what we were trying to achieve to overcome some hurdles. Some things that make complete sense in the tourism activities ecosystem may need more flexibility for ticketed live events. Fortunately, we connected with a team that saw the vision in the way that we did, and were willing to make some of those changes and give things a go.
I think the fail-fast mentality, ‘if it works, great; if it doesn't, we'll change’, gave us comfort on our growth journey with GetYourGuide.
What’s the biggest challenge facing your sector today, and has GetYourGuide helped to address it?
The customer’s time. What GetYourGuide does really well is manage how it markets to customers and how it promotes and positions itself in its marketplace. It empowers. Time is the greatest commodity when you're out traveling, because you've only got so long in a destination.
We've seen the value of working with a channel like GetYourGuide in that it empowers customers to book every component of their trip in that one ecosystem, in that one basket.
They use their algorithm, categories, and filters effectively to ensure our experiences get the right visibility. Let's say, when a customer goes to San Francisco, they take an Alcatraz tour during the day. If that was the main thing they were doing, they might think, "We’ll just go to dinner,” or something. Booking through GetYourGuide, though, they’ll see that there's a Golden State Warriors game at Chase Center that night, and might book that as well.
It's great for the traveler, it's great for all of us as suppliers, because we're all getting a shot at being a part of the tapestry of a customer's vacation.
How has GetYourGuide contributed to your growth or operational success?
I have a lot of positive things to say about GetYourGuide’s technology. As a supplier, taking a product to market, the ease with which we can use a partner’s system is so critical to how fast we can move and how much we can offer on their platform.
GetYourGuide’s extranet is incredibly good. It allows us suppliers so much control, but also so much opportunity, and it’s quite honestly, a big part of why we were able to grow with GetYourGuide so quickly. The technology makes everything easy; loading a product on GetYourGuide is a beautiful experience.
How would you describe the guests you attract from GetYourGuide, and has that changed over time?
We have attracted a younger audience of culture seekers through GetYourGuide. We have a traditional audience of sports fans who are more about the game. What we've attracted from GetYourGuide, though, is an independent traveler who sees the game as a component of a destination’s culture.
From the reviews we've read and received, they really extract the cultural nuances of sporting events, because it’s where the people of the city come together. It’s a special kind of customer. It's a curious traveler.
Personally, it reminds me of traveling through Europe with a backpack, seeing a lot of things for the first time, and enjoying all sorts of new cultural experiences. So it's energizing to read that feedback as well, on a personal note.
How does GetYourGuide fit in with your overall marketing strategy?
When we bring a new product to market, we use GetYourGuide to test the market and try to get an understanding of what works and what doesn't. So they're a great ‘friend’ when it comes to bringing fresh offerings to this vertical and trying things. Similarly, we do the same kind of testing when we're opening new markets.
We look to GetYourGuide for specific market insights, and we try to collect their learnings for new markets when we enter them. So, we often rely on GetYourGuide from a tactical perspective to drive volume during key periods or for new market entry.
If you were talking to another operator who was skeptical about OTAs, what would you say?
I would say, when you're booking a trip, where do you find things to do? If the answer is, I go to an OTA, then that's your answer.
If you want to be visible, if you want to be considered, the reason why OTAs are so successful, but also so empowering for operators, is that they give us visibility as a collective that would be really tricky for us to get on our own.
Customers want choice. Customers want to see all their options in one place. Customers want to build an itinerary in one place and through platforms they trust.
I would encourage working with them, because that's where the customers are, and then lean into it and build your product using all of the tools and all the magic that they give you to make yourself stand out.
Key Takeaways
- Sports Where I Am sends over 10,000 travelers to sporting events per year through GetYourGuide, and they are growing at a 50% year-on-year rate.
- 98% of their bookings come through OTAs, which is deliberate, since they have sunset their direct-to-consumer channel.
- GetYourGuide’s technology is critical to how quickly it can ‘move’ and how much it can offer on its platform.
- Sports Where I Am really values how GetYourGuide helps them launch new products and expand into new markets by allowing them to test what does and doesn’t work.
- OTAs like GetYourGuide can be used to test demand before you invest heavily in a new category or market.
