NASCAR today will announce a deal with Hotels for Hope that will see the upstart hotel booking company become the sanctioning body's official hotel booking partner. NASCAR VP/Business Development Chad Seigler told THE DAILY that the multiyear deal involves a rights fee. Hotels for Hope describes itself as a for-profit social enterprise, and it has worked with events in the music space like Lollapalooza and motorsports venues like Circuit of the Americas. However, this is its first deal with a major U.S. league. The pact will involve using the brand’s proprietary technology and its own call center for a new part of NASCAR’s website that will be linked to the schedule page and find hotel rooms for fans. The tech aggregates hotel rates from more than 20 distribution channels for three categories: group inventory that the company went out and procured itself, global distribution systems (i.e. Marriott, Hilton), and online travel agencies. As part of the deal, Hotels for Hope will contribute $1 for every room night booked through the NASCAR portal to the child-focused NASCAR Foundation. The company will also now manage the sanctioning body’s corporate bookings around future races and be associated with a new digital editorial series dubbed “Raceday Hotels" about travel on NASCAR.com. Seigler said NASCAR identified this category as one it wanted to fill a couple years ago and, after talking to a number of companies in the space, has been working with Hotels for Hope for roughly the past year setting up the program. Hotels for Hope becomes NASCAR’s 56th official partner.
BOOK IT: Seigler said of landing a booking partner that works with multiple hotels vs. working with one hotel, “Could we have go out and do an individual hotel deal with ‘Company X’? We could have done that. What we liked about (Hotels for Hope Founder & CEO Neil Goldman) and the online booking piece is this being so consumer and fan facing, it just felt like you’re giving the fan a lot of options to get to the track.” Seigler added, "What was really intriguing to us ... was kind of the way he was going to market, not just the online booking and hotel services but his whole angle of giving back and the charitable arm.” Goldman said of his company’s appeal to NASCAR, “Based on the amount of volume we do from a hotel procurement standpoint, we get discounted hotel rates, we have amazing relationships with all the hotel brands -- we’re are able to mitigate risk for them -- and probably the biggest impetus for NASCAR is our technology, custom white-label booking portals, so that technology allows us to seamlessly integrated into their ecosystem and allows us to be able to expand out the exclusive and discounted hotel rates to fans and people in the NASCAR industry.” Goldman said his company will be able to leverage economies of scale to try to find hotels that are willing to offer the best rates to those who buy rooms through NASCAR.com. Meanwhile, Goldman said his company has a deal in the college sports space that will be announced in the coming weeks.