Skift Take
Digital ticketing solutions for tours and attractions are seeing sports events emerge as a winning category for customer engagement as travelers continue to plan around bucket-list events.
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 M