Offering Sports Fans Peek Experiences
Could a partnership with the PGA Tour help activity booking company Peek.com cross the chasm into the mainstream market?
This is part four of a a series of posts about Peek, an online activities booking marketplace. Here are parts one, two, three, and five.
Over the past seven years I have become one of the best travel agents in the world.
I admit, this is only self-proclaimed. I haven’t been formally recognized for my talents (yet). Even worse, I don’t get paid to be a travel agent —and I never have.
I have played pro golf since 2007. In trying to climb up the golf ranks, I played on every tour around the world that I could qualify for. I spent the majority of the last seven years in a new location every week. Managing this lifestyle as my own agent made me quite skilled at navigating online travel bookings.
That said, existing travel services have generally made these bookings fantastically easy. In terms of booking flights, hotels, and cars, websites like kayak.com have made this experience fairly straightforward. The one particular area of the online travel industry that does seem to have an opportunity for “disruption” is the adventure and activities market. For me, my greatest frustrations in travel come outside of the service offerings of the kayak.com’s of the world. Although sites like Trip Advisor and Lonely Planet offer useful reviews on travel experiences, booking an adventure leaves one with dozens of windows open and no one source to trust. I have wasted far more time attempting to navigate my way through the massive amount of travel activity options than I ever have booking a flight, car, or hotel.
Luckily, some startups are providing solutions to this problem. Sites like Get Your Guide, Viator, and relatively new entrant into the marketplace: Peek.com. Peek raised attention on March 5th, 2014 when they raised a $5M second round of funding from a star-studded cast of investors — Eric Schmidt, Jack Dorsey, David Bonderman, SV Angel, and CAA.
In an attempt to tap into the reported $27 Billion US market (more than 4 times that worldwide), Peek aims to offer an OpenTable-like experience for the destination activities market. They package a variety of activities and adventure experiences that can be booked directly from their website and their recently released mobile app.
Although it is arguably a crowded market, Peek has a tremendous product that is directly targeted to this activities niche. Though still expanding their services, their aesthetically pleasing interface, unique adventure offerings, “tastemaker recommendations,” and last minute update service all provide the easy to use, one-stop experience that travellers have been wanting.
While Peek has gotten initial traction with early adopters who were excited to use its curated service, the mainstream market won’t automatically follow these early adopters. With that in mind, the question is how Peek will cross the chasm to gain acceptance and popular use by the mainstream market.
Peek could enhance its product and increase its brand awareness by finding the right partners. There are many opportunities for Peek but one that immediately came to (at least my) mind was a partnership with a professional sports organization. While partnerships in pro-sports generally go to the highest bidder, no one is bidding for a partnership in the activities market, Peek’s bread and butter. Such a partnership would bring value offering to organizations like the NHL, NBA, and PGA Tour, none of which have partnerships of this kind.
The PGA Tour could be Peek’s best initial foothold in the the sport market. First of all, the customer demographic that travels to watch a PGA Tour event typically has excess disposable income (a perfect fit for some of Peek’s high ticket offerings). The PGA Tour is widely considered the most trusted professional sports organization, which makes up a portion of Peek’s target audience. There are also six tours under the PGA Tour umbrella and over 100 tournaments around the world each year, which would give Peek a large audience in almost every location they service. This would enable Peek to market their offerings in a new location each week.
This partnership could greatly benefit Peek in many different ways. The “shoot for the stars” outcome for Peek would be to somehow find their way onto the tournament schedule interface (seen below), that already offers golf patrons a link to book tournament tickets, airfare, hotel, and cars for each event.
Although this may be an unlikely first step, alternative agreements like a link through the PGA Tour Experiences site could be a great initial opportunity for Peek.
While the partnership’s benefits to the PGA tour may seem limited, there are more than a few reasons it would actually be a great fit. As earlier mentioned, Peek targets a very specific niche market — activities. PGA Tour events themselves are activities that, in the long-term, could be offered on Peek’s website, but the experience the PGA Tour provides to a fan at an event is limited to the golf course. The Peek activity platform would now allow the PGA Tour to offer fans a full travel experience at their events. Golf fans travel from all over the world to attend PGA Tour tournaments—not to mention their subset tours: Champions Tour, Web.com Tour, etc. As you can see in the screenshot above, the Tour partners with travel companies to offer flights, hotels, and car rental services to their patrons. A link to Peek’s local booking service creates a full breadth of offerings, like a virtual concierge service, where local activities pre- or post-golf would complete the fan’s experience.
Another opportunity within the partnership for the PGA Tour would be offering tournament ticket packages on Peek’s platform. This would allow the PGA Tour to widen their marketing efforts by showing up on the radar screen of Peek travellers who may not otherwise have considered attending the PGA Tour event. This would be even more beneficial for the PGA Tour’s subset events like the Champions Tour and Web.com, which have a harder time attracting spectators. Although this seems like a conflict of interest for the PGA, due to pre-existing ticketing agreements, Peek could perhaps get around this by not charging their usual percentage from the sale and instead use the opportunity as a price for partnership.
An important (but less obvious) benefit for the PGA Tour in a partnership with Peek is in using Peek’s offering as a way to promote all activities and events in the local area in which they are hosting tournaments. Peek, unlike most startups, directs money towards small businesses in the communities it serves. While a typical PGA tour event draws locals away from competing local activities, the event also draws in travellers. If the PGA tour links these travellers to the other activities in the local community, this cash influx could benefit everyone.
Tweet this: Peek, unlike most startups, directs money towards small businesses in the communities it serves.
At the end of the day, this kind of proposed partnership—an early stage activities company and a behemoth of a sports organizations—would be a tough deal to push through to say the least. After all, Peek currently services only 19 cities. But, as they continue to expand into more locations, Peek’s niche value offering is something that could attract the attention of these large sports organizations.
I know from my experiences as a player that fans that I talk to at events are always searching for local activities when they leave the course. Hopefully the PGA Tour could see the value in allowing Peek to help them provide a service that they don’t currently offer. This mutually beneficial relationship could be crucial in Peek reaching the mainstream market.
Be sure to check out parts one, two, three, and five of this series.
