Travel Brands Woo Customers with Bucket List Sports Events

25.08.2023 - 13:21 / skift.com / Selene Brophy / Pegasus Airlines

Football fans visiting Barcelona find attending a local match as much a bucket list experience as seeing the Spanish city’s historical temple of Sagrada Familia.

That’s according to Mark McLaughlin, CEO of Coras, a Dublin-based ticket distribution platform that has partnered with teams such as FC Barcelona, Manchester City, and AC Milan.

Coras’s network of distribution partners includes the UK low-cost carrier Ryanair, U.S. carrier Frontier, Iceland’s FlyPlay, and Japanese marketplace Rakuten. The company has also just added Pegasus Airlines .

McLaughlin believes sporting events offer a unique opportunity for brands to upsell and market their core services – whether a sports event ticket is sold with flights and a hotel stay for the trip or as a single product offering to locals.

“From our experience, customers are 15-20 times more likely to buy when presented with in-path purchase offering, for example, being able to buy tickets with their flights in a single transaction,” said McLaughlin.

“There are so many different things that a customer can do in a city when they travel, so offering products that are relevant to their dates, destination, language and currency, and them being able to pay with a saved card in an existing account, reduces so much friction and drives increased purchases.”

Sports events can also grow direct customer engagement, suggested McLaughlin. They create lucrative and exclusive sponsorship deals, like Turkish Airlines preparing for its second as UEFA champions league sponsor. Yet not all brands can tap marketing spends of this proportion. 

The Turkish Airlines booking website does not offer any tours, attractions or sport event tickets to book, despite its extensive sponsorship deals. Skift reached out to Turkish Airlines about their UEFA sponsorship and the sale of sport event tickets, but has yet to receive a response.

Noting that the current airline distribution partners for Coras were all low-cost carriers, Mclaughlin stated “ancillary (extra charges for baggage, pre-seating and inflight food, for example), is a more important part of their revenue mix for sure.”  

“These tickets are high volume compared to the number of tours an operator can sell daily. Sporting fixtures, like the Premier League also act like a specific marketing schedule,” said McLaughlin. “These tickets also come at a higher price than other experiences, and the purchase window is usually much further in advance.”

Sports tickets also require a special integration, McLaughlin added, and the company has made this a priority. “If you are going to do sports ticketing, you have to do it right. We’ve done quite a bit of technical work to do both activity tickets and sports event tickets,” he said.

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