5 Ways to Incentivize Teams to Book Your Hotels | Tournament Directors

• Posted: Dec 03, 2020

When hosting a tournament, hotel bookings can be a crucial source of revenue if teams are given the proper incentives. Although you may have discounted room blocks set up, these alone may not be enough to entice teams to book.

Fortunately, there are 5 simple ways for tournament directors to incentivize all their participants to book with them and increase revenue:

1.   Make Your Event “Stay-to-Play”

Stay-to-play events require all participating teams to book their reservations with the accommodating hotels specified by the tournament director. This is oftentimes an essential first step to increasing your number of bookings.

However, this type of event does have its downsides...

o Limited hotel options

o After you add rebates & commissions, it’s not that much of a discount

o It’s difficult for directors to track every reservation made by all teams (lots of administrative work)

Lucid Travel solves these problems for you by creating a custom booking link with discounts available automatically (no room blocks needed). This allows participants to book at any hotel they want and browse for the best deal. Lucid also provides tournament directors with an administrative account to track reservations in real-time and get reports weekly to keep teams compliant with the 'Stay-to-Play' policy.

Simply sign up for free and define how much you want to earn per room night!

2.   Lower Your Tournament Fees

Instead of charging teams a huge tournament fee, you can actually offer them a discounted rate or even make it free for them to book their hotels through you.

At a recent tournament hosted by Showtime Sports, they used Lucid Travel to help with their event hotels/lodging. Lucid advised them to drastically discount the $500 fee that they used to charge each team & set the reservation minimum per team at 10 reservations; they could then receive $15+ per room/night sold.

Lucid Travel allows teams to browse the hotels where room blocks have been set up, as well as hotels from their general inventory. They collect the best rates from 3 separate sources:

The Result for Showtime Sports

Showtime Sports was able to double the size of their event by lowering the registration fee. With Lucid Travel as their lodging partner, they ended up making an average of $550 per team ($50 more than their original price) with the revenue generated from hotel sales.

3.   Incentivize Teams With Rebates

What better way to prompt teams to book with you

then to offer them money to do so?

Suppose you tell a team if they have at least 10 people book at (x) hotel, then they’ll get $100 back...

If you're making $10 per room & the team books 10 rooms for 2 nights each (20 room nights) that = $200 in revenue / a $100 profit after you give them their $100 rebate.

With this model, anyone who didn’t want to book certain hotels for specified prices while attending your event now has a financial incentive to do so!

Set up a custom tournament director account for your event now.

4.   Make It Simple 

“Variety Simplicity is the spice of life”

The more accessible your room block is, the more reservations it will generate.

How do you make your room block accessible?

Start by working with an innovative housing company that has a high focus on software and specializes in product-integration.

Lucid helps you set up your own custom-link that’s associated with your organization/event:

--allowing you to--

#1 Add it to your event listing online

#2 Display it immediately after teams register so they'll receive info about available hotel deals (also include a reservation link so they can browse & book) 

#3 Include your travel link in automatic emailssent to teams after they register

5.   Focus on the Best Pricing

You can further your advantage by negotiating with various hotels for room blocks / special discounts.

Travel is somewhat of a commodity business – price is a big piece of it. So if the prices you show for your tournament’s hotels are the lowest, people will book with you.

However, if you're event is small or it's your first time entering such negotiations then this will be difficult - work with Lucid Travel, who can consolidate deals online and also provide access to exclusive discounts.

--  Schedule a Free Demo with Lucid Travel CEO Ben Knosby  --