Affinity Travel Benefits Sponsorship
As most of you know, one of IAGA’s premier partnerships is with Affinity Travel Benefits. Fun fact: Affinity has forged relationships with nearly 50 golf associations, molding their offering specifically to serve your members.
With Affinity’s travel and entertainment platform, Allied Golf Association members are enjoying up to 70% discounts on hotel rooms and greatly reduced pricing on a robust supply of tickets to sporting events, concerts, theme parks, and movies. Golf associations are benefitting from enhanced member loyalty by associating their brand with a valuable and highly utilized benefit. In fact, according to Affinity, AGA members are averaging $120 in savings per booking.
“We work in a wide variety of industries but the culture in golf is unlike any other,” said Affinity’s President, Stephen Boyd, “When travel is promoted by email, social media or the eRevision newsletter, we see registrations converting north of 20% consistently. Golfers love to read about their sport, and they clearly value and trust in the content and products provided by their allied golf associations. It is a special relationship and the results are immediate and palpable.”
Affinity launched its first golfer-dedicated travel site in February 2016. Twenty golf sites were active by mid-summer, and Affinity soon learned from its partners of a growing need to support lodging for tournaments. “We challenged our technology team to create sites that geo-locate the golf venue and then sort hotels by proximity.” said Stephen.
“We’ve benefitted from using Affinity’s travel platform both internally and externally,” said Matt Vanderpool, Georgia State Golf Association’s executive director. “We’ve significantly reduced staff and volunteer time and travel costs and provided tournament players with flexibility to secure savings while maintaining hotel brand alligences, if necessary.
Affinity has expanded its travel services to include host hotels for golf events. Affinity reaches out to all the qualified hotels near tournament venues, obtains discounted pricing, and whenever possible negotiates amenities like complimentary parking, breakfast and wifi.
Bruce Jones, Affinity’s vice president of sales, said “This is an exciting part of our business. We discuss needs with our golf partners, negotiate the rates and details with hotels for their events, and present the information back to them in a highly organized, simple format for a final decision; then we set up a branded, booking webpage for competitors and add it to the travel site. Turnkey and simple is the goal. And if there are enough bookings, we get comped rooms for staff.”
So what’s next for Affinity? “Marketing support, surveys and enhancements to the user-experience,” said Lee Thomas, Affinity’s chief operating officer. “We currently offer turnkey advertising plans and collateral in our marketing asset library and our partners are building great loyalty programs with sustained marketing campaigns. Beyond this, we intend to use data and surveys to enhance our sites and organically grow sales for our partners. We want all partners to be successful in equal measure – from the smallest partner with limited staffing to the largest partner with every success tool at their disposal. This is how we’ll define success in the future.”
Affinity, which recently signed a five-year extension with the IAGA, offers IAGA Members free travel websites and host hotels services, and a revenue share on member purchases. Contact Affinity to learn more at hello@affinitytravelbenefits.com or 844-MYTRAVL (844-698-7285)