The worldwide sports leader and the online travel site have a website in development that will literally make it easier to follow a favorite team around during the season.
Wives of sports fans, and probably a few husbands of fans, may find their fan spouses planning the next vacation around Pedro Martinez’s starts with the Mets instead of around a destination like Disney World. Unless of course, it’s spring training when the Braves take residence at Disney in March. At least the hotel rates are pretty reasonable in late winter.
The Orbitz and ESPN team-up will enable fans to book hotels and even vacation packages based around sporting events, Dow Jones reported.
“Orbitz’ agreement with ESPN.com is a slam dunk for sports fans who want to literally follow their favorite teams,” Randy Wagner, chief marketing officer at Orbitz, said in the report.
Though not limited to any one sport, it is easy to imagine this being popular with NFL fans. With a shorter season and game schedules mostly fixed on Sundays, the dedicated fan could easily plan out eight road trips.
Of course, the dedicated fan may have to plan a vacation around marriage counseling after that. But the New York Giants really do look like they could have a great season coming up this fall, ok so they play Indy at home and Seattle on the road, again, AGAIN, who made this schedule…
Did I mention the website hasn’t launched yet? It hasn’t. Darn.
Although fans can easily plan out such vacations today by using Orbitz and ESPN separately, we anticipate the pairing will have some compelling packages created by ESPN exclusively for the new site. ESPN’s owner, the Walt Disney Company, has considerable marketing strengths, and maybe they will build packages around ESPN notables like Dan Patrick. We’re sure Dan will be thrilled.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
