How Explore La Crosse Adapts Hotel Offerings to Capture More Data

Q3: How did hotel partners react initially, and how important has flexibility been in how you present booking options?

Ben: There were some concerns at first, mostly because hotels didn’t fully understand how it worked. Some thought people needed to create a Playeasy account or log in to see special rates, which would have added an extra step. So there was definitely an education component upfront, especially letting hotel partners know no sign-up was required by users to book hotels or click special links.

We do bi-monthly meetings with our hotel partners, and early on we spent a good amount of time walking through how reservations on Playeasy actually work. That education is ongoing, partly because of hotel turnover and partly because we continue to use Playeasy in new ways as the platform evolves.

One thing hotels really appreciate is that it’s not one size fits all. Some hotels can support booking links, some prefer call to book, and sometimes we offer both. Playeasy has allowed us to present all of that information in one place in a really flexible way, which has been huge.

The biggest thing we educate partners on is how we’re pulling rates, what events we’re doing it for, and why. If a room block expires 30 days before an event, that hotel is still being listed and promoted through live rates.

For example, maybe there were five or ten rooms left in a block that didn’t get used. Now visitors still have a chance to book at a live rate. That data doesn’t go into the original block, but we can still show how many room nights were picked up after the cutoff date.

I’m probably not speaking just for La Crosse when I say that people are registering for events closer and closer to the event dates. Being able to keep lodging options available after cutoff dates, while still tracking that data, has been extremely valuable for planning, hotels, and event partners.

Some of our hotels are popular properties that can’t offer booking links at all. That’s why we worked with your team to add a call-to-book option, where teams call and mention the event to receive the special rate. What’s nice is that it’s not just “click here” or nothing. Sometimes it’s a link, sometimes it’s call-in, and sometimes it’s both. Playeasy gives us the flexibility to broadcast all of that clearly to attendees in one place.

Q4: How do you decide when to use live rates versus room blocks, and what have you learned through trial and error?

Jeremiah: I’d say it’s very event-specific. The sport, size of the event, and where it’s held all matter. Indoor winter sports at the La Crosse Center, where hotels are close by, tend to work well with a smaller group of hotels and direct booking links.

Fishing tournaments are very different. They’re longer stays, and a lot of attendees end up booking Airbnbs or searching for discounts on their own. In the past, we tried pointing them to specific hotels with good rates, but pickup was minimal because people were booking elsewhere.

What we found is that pulling the best available live rates through Playeasy works really well for those types of events. The rates match what attendees are finding anywhere else and everything is all in one place. That information is shared directly by the event organizer through registration and event materials, and those events have benefited the most from live rates from the start.

Ben: A lot of our improvements have come from learning what works for different types of groups. For example, using call-to-book options for events where teams need to book more than 10 rooms at once.

Jeremiah: We’re also hosting the State Wrestling Championships for the first time this year, which is a good example of that flexibility. We offer a direct booking link with a discounted rate for individual attendees, but also make it clear that groups can call to book if they need multiple rooms. Through trial and error on past events, we’ve learned how to set that up so it works better and avoids issues we would’ve had if we only offered booking links.

Q5: What kind of feedback have you received from event organizers?

Ben: We actually just talked about this over the past week. Pretty much every event we've utilized Playeasy for has wanted to do it again the next time which is good. We've done a little bit of tinkering and learned what’s worked on some events.

For example, a lot of teams from one tournament preferred to call. The first year when I created the Playeasy page for them, I gave them the online booking links and they said, “You know what? It was nice because all of the information for the hotels was in one area. However, the booking links didn't work for teams to book 12 to 15 rooms at once”. So we just improvised and made a page with the hotels but included a phone number to call instead.

We still used Playeasy for this because the event page looks nice, has all the businesses and photos on it, and works pretty smooth. I would say all the feedback we've received has been positive and everyone has wanted to use it again. We've made the right changes with certain events to the point where we'll just trial and error it to keep improving our offerings.

Q6: How does access to booking and visitor engagement data improve how you communicate value to hotels and stakeholders?

Jeremiah: We actively share this data, and it’s become a big part of how we communicate value internally and externally. It’s actually going into our year-end report to the board so they can clearly see how we’re using Playeasy, how we’re ranking, and the value it’s bringing back to the destination. The EasyMoney program has also been really helpful because it helps offset the cost of the platform as an added bonus.

But the biggest impact has been access to data we’ve never been able to track before. One example is the last 30 days after an event room block cutoff. Historically, once a booking link expired, we had no visibility into what happened next.

Now, we can see things like 50 additional users and 25 more room nights picked up after that cutoff, data we never had before. When a hotel asks, “We didn’t see any pickup for this event, do you know what happened?”, we can actually go into the backend and say, “We had 13 users click on your rates and three bookings come through, so we know people stayed there.”

Even when bookings don’t convert, we can still see how many users viewed a hotel and share that insight. Sometimes the rate was just too high, and that’s helpful feedback we can pass along. So having that visibility has definitely improved how we communicate value and have more informed conversations with our hotel partners.

Q7: How do you make sure event organizers actually share the lodging pages with their teams?

Ben: For the most part, organizers are going to push it out anyway because they want to give as much information about their event, lodging, and overall experience as possible. But I’ve been pretty adamant about hammering it home in a nice way, saying, “Here’s the link. Put it on your social channels, include it in an email blast, however you’re communicating with attendees, get this in front of them.”

We can also make it simple and tell them, “Hey, here’s just the hotel information. Don’t worry about anything else on the page.”

If it’s a mom-and-pop organizer that doesn’t have a big website or time to build an event page, the Playeasy microsite works just as well as any website they would build. The page can link to registration, show hotel options, and include other promotional offers, which we’ve been using more recently.

I usually put all of this in an email and tell them to flood whatever channels they have with the information. If visitors are coming from out of town, they’re going to need lodging, so I stress that this is where they’ll find the best rates either through our room block rates or live rates pulling the best available options.

Jeremiah: Another great place we encourage organizers to share lodging is on their registration pages. They can link to it directly or even redirect people to lodging right after someone registers. They need rooms anyway, so pushing that information upfront helps get it done instead of it falling to the bottom of the to-do list.

Q8: What advice would you give destinations trying to improve their event housing strategy?

Jeremiah: I’d echo what Ben mentioned earlier, education is key, especially with hotel partners. With turnover being so common, continuing to educate hotels on how you’re operating and evolving is really important. They appreciate it because it actually makes things easier for them.

Playeasy continues to be easier for our hotels which makes it a win-win situation for us. It's more data, more trackable. It's easier for the hotels and the stakeholders to get the lodging into their properties. And then for the clients, it's a win because it's a really nice-looking landing page with the best rates that we can get. And it’s as easy as possible to get their attendees the information to make the necessary bookings.

It's one less thing for the clients to have to worry about since their job is to run a great tournament. We try to take all the extra stuff off their plate - which is a big deal if they otherwise would have to call around and do all that work by phone or email.

Ben: I echo that as well. The only other thing I would add would just be for other people that are like myself and Jeremiah, that are maybe new to Playeasy or considering the idea of adding the hotel stuff, is just to go in there and get creative with it.

I mean, you can literally have the ability to have all your hotels be live rates, or just pick and choose certain hotels, or have some that are dedicated room blocks and also show a couple others that are live rates simultaneously.

“So even if you put a request out to 20 hotels and you only hear back from seven of them and five of those give you a block. Well, guess what? The other 15? There's nothing to stop you from putting them on the list and putting them on as live rates. Get creative with it. You might not look like you have a huge number of rooms dedicated to the event, but once you start adding those live rates, your page fills up really fast. You can come up with more rooms than you think that you probably could”.