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How Visit Central Florida Scaled Partner Engagement Across 300+ Events
Alex Dry, Visit Central Florida Sports
How Alex and Visit Central Florida are building a scalable partner engagement solution that creates a win-win-win for local businesses, event organizers, and their county.
"These businesses now have the option to say, 'Hey, I want to create a promotion for this event at this facility' and they can now reach them. Where in the past, we were making custom itineraries and all kinds of different things to try to solve that problem and we never really could."
Alex Dry
Senior Sales & Events Supervisor
Q1: What partner engagement strategies have been most effective for supporting local businesses at scale?
While we’re already seeing strong engagement, we feel like we’re just getting started and have a lot more opportunity to continue improving the experience for our sports visitors. Our focus is continuing to create as many touchpoints as possible between our staff and local partners, and truly building a marketplace where partners can interact directly with our rights holders, as well as their participants and spectators. We’re communicating to our businesses that they now have a platform through Playeasy to connect with these attendees. And the more people we can get to use the platform, the more beneficial it will be for both parties.
The way we kicked this strategy off was through our first Partner summit. We brought all our partners together this past April for an informal education session to help them better understand how we bring events to market and how we help attendees enjoy their time while they’re here. One of the biggest justifications for finally getting this event off the ground was our use of Playeasy.
Any partner that wants to manage their business listing can now get access to their page and see all our upcoming sports events in a calendar view. It’s easy for them to create promotions for attendees to see and also see which events are happening nearby their location.
The initial feedback on Playeasy from our partners was incredible, and we’ve had a ton of great follow-up conversations since then. We're mentioning Playeasy in any conversation we have with partners because it's truly integrated into our day-to-day use at this point.
Q2: Can you explain how you set up your summit and decided which businesses to involve?
We’re part of county government, so it’s important that we approach this in an inclusive way. We shared the invitation with businesses and organizations we’ve worked with in the past, whether they are official Visit Central Florida Sports partners through in-kind agreements or businesses that regularly work with our sports groups and stay engaged with the events coming into the county.
We also made sure to include our parks and recreation partners, along with several local colleges and universities, so they could better understand how the platform can support their facilities and events.
For rights holders, we invited a small group who operate some of our largest or highest-volume events. They’re in a position to really scale what we’re doing with Playeasy and help make a meaningful impact across a large number of events and attendees. Overall, the goal was to make sure everyone understood how the platform fits into our broader approach to supporting sports tourism and the community.
Jake's Take
What stands out most about Alex and the Visit Central Florida is how quickly they rolled out a brand-new partner offering after leaning into new technology. When you’re welcoming more than 300 sports events a year, trying to meaningfully connect all of those attendees with local partners can feel overwhelming. You can’t rely on one-off efforts or manual outreach; you need systems that work consistently without adding more work for your team or your partners.
Instead of trying to do everything themselves, Alex and his team focused on building an approach that scales. Their Inaugural Partner Summit was a big step forward, but what impressed me most was how naturally Playeasy has become part of their day-to-day workflow and how fully the team has embraced it.
Not every destination is quick to adopt new ways of doing things, but it’s clear it’s paid off for Visit Central Florida so far based on their partner feedback. And they’re just getting started! This interview is a great example of how destinations can shift from reactive efforts to a proactive, repeatable model that works at scale.
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Q3:What specific partner visibility challenges were you trying to solve, and why couldn’t traditional approaches scale?
Our partners wanted to get involved, but one of the biggest challenges we faced was that we had 300 events a year, with some teams registering just days before the event, which made it tough to scale with such little lead time. With our new structure in place, our partners know what events are coming in and when, along with how to reach them and share information, which helps us create a scalable solution rather than one-off partnerships.
Having those relationships secured ahead of time is key because we want our event organizers to know that when they’re running their events in Polk County, they have our full support in making sure their attendees are having a good time so that they can focus on executing the event.
Q4: How does Playeasy help your destination support local businesses and partners?
Playeasy has given us a platform to help businesses get involved without requiring us to constantly share that message. Polk County is 2,000 sq. miles... so some of our events may be hosted at venues 45 minutes from each other for different age groups. It’s always been a challenge for us to share the messaging individually with groups of what's most relevant for them to do near their event. The ability for us to create event pages that show things to do right around their specific venue has been a huge help.
In the past the businesses would say, “Hey, there's this event and it's at four different facilities. One's 5 minutes from me, one's 45 minutes from me. How do I get in touch with people 5 minutes from me?”
These businesses now have the option to say, “Hey, I want to create a promotion for this event at this facility” and they can now reach them. Where in the past, we were making custom itineraries and all kinds of different things to try to solve that problem and we never really could.
Q5: Have you noticed changes in partner engagement, traffic, or referrals?
Restaurant owners would mention people came in wearing uniforms, but there was never really any proof we drove them there. We couldn't control that narrative and prove we were connecting with the attendees. This is important because the more we can connect with attendees directly, the longer they’re going to stay, and the more money they’re going to spend in our county.
So now with Playeasy, we can tell a business or restaurant that they received 1,000 interactions on their promotion. Or if they didn’t receive much business, we can look at that and say - well you didn’t offer a promotion, and other businesses did and received traffic.
Our Visit Central Florida Welcome Center is one of the best in the country, but they can only reach so many people in person – so we can now directly reach the 500,000 visitors we have coming in for sports events at scale to help improve their event experience.
Q6: How are you working with the event organizer to push the event pages out to their attendees?
We integrate Playeasy’s event microsites into our Visit Central Florida Sports Website and then share all those links in our pre-event emails to rights holders for them to share with their attendees. We try to take as much of the workload off the rights holder's hands as possible, while still giving the attendees a great visitor experience.
We used to create custom itineraries for 100ish out of our 300 events which would take forever. So now we’re just building the microsites and it essentially includes everything we need visitors to know all in one spot, and we can add customizations from there as needed.
Different rights holders are using it in different ways with some putting links to it on their own website, and now with Compass we will be exploring further ways to embed our content on event organizer’s websites.
Q7: What advice would you give to other DMOs trying to engage their partners more effectively?
My advice to other DMOs is the same advice I’d have for myself and our team here, to just get started and keep going. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming to get everything built and share the information, but ultimately what we now believe Playeasy enables us to do for 450 event occurrences was nearly impossible for even 50 events before.
What we’ve seen work is sharing the event page way ahead of time and having specific QR codes for the microsites that can be placed on-site at the venue. One of the things we are planning to improve this year is replicating that process across all our events and getting more people to use them.
We can now offer 10 times the quantity of event experiences for our event partners with data to see what’s working, which is absolutely worth it.
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