ECAL launches ‘Stay ‘n Play’, a global partnership with Booking.com

AUSTRALIA, 12^th October 2021 – ECAL, the world’s leading calendar marketing platform, has launched ‘Stay ‘n Play’, in partnership with one of the world’s leading digital travel companies, Booking.com.

In a world first, Stay ‘n Play is set to deliver the best available accommodation offers around upcoming events, straight into the personal digital calendar of its users.

Detailed accommodation information will include recommended properties, pricing, and reviews, with a direct link to browse and book the best available stays from Booking.com nearest the venue – from hotels, homes, apartments and other unique places to stay.

Stay ‘n Play is yet another breakthrough innovation for ECAL’s growing roster of top tier events publishers, and its millions of users worldwide.

It’s perfect timing for event organisers and fans who have an insatiable thirst for live events right now, and is great encouragement for friends and families to stay on and celebrate after their favourite sports event, show, concert, or festival.

Hot off the heels of launching Hyper to facilitate instant payments from the calendar, Stay ‘n Play reinforces ECAL’s desire to provide its audience with important, personalised and actionable information around the moments that matter, at the right time and in the right place.

ECAL Founder and CEO, Patrick Barrett says: “We are proud to bring such a wonderful innovation to market, to help support the ‘return of fans’ movement we are seeing right now around the world. We want to make it as easy as possible for our users to engage and participate in the moments that matter the most to them.”

Xaveer Fluitman, Regional Director Marketing – Partnerships at Booking.com, says: “As we can begin to  start experiencing the world again, our mission at Booking.com is to make it easy for everyone to do just that. We look forward to a strong partnership with ECAL that will enable travelers to search and book their perfect stay – powered by Booking.com – around the moments that matter to them through the ECAL Sync to Calendar product.”

Stay ‘n Play is now available for ECAL publisher clients.

About ECAL:
A HyperKu company (hyperku.com), ECAL (ecal.com) is a world-leading calendar marketing platform, used by 300+ major brands globally across sports, entertainment, media, ticketing and payments. ECAL publisher clients include Premier League, NBA, LaLiga, FC Barcelona, ICC Cricket, England & Wales Cricket Board, Formula E, NBC Sports, Ticketek, AFL, NRL, Cricket Australia, NBL, The Australian Ballet and more.

ECAL is on a mission to help publishers communicate events better, and to enhance and simplify the experience for their audience. Headquartered in Melbourne, with a presence in London, Los Angeles, Singapore, Delhi and Manila, ECAL’s smart and dynamic ‘sync to calendar’ technology delivers important, hyper-personalised and actionable events direct to calendar, for better business outcomes.

The Stay ‘n Play booking portal is at https://www.staynplay.co

About Booking.com:

Part of Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: BKNG), Booking.com’s mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world whenever it’s safe to do so again. By investing in the technology that helps take the friction out of travel, Booking.com seamlessly connects millions of travelers with memorable experiences, a range of transportation options and incredible places to stay – from homes to hotels and much more. As one of the world’s largest travel marketplaces for both established brands and entrepreneurs of all sizes, Booking.com enables properties all over the world to reach a global audience and grow their businesses. Booking.com is available in 44 languages and offers more than 28 million total reported accommodation listings, including more than 6.6 million listings of homes, apartments and other unique places to stay. No matter where you want to go or what you want to do, Booking.com makes it easy and backs it all up with 24/7 customer support.

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, like us on Facebook, and for the latest news, data and insights, please visit our global media room.

Premier League, the world’s most popular football league, has released its 2021/22 season fixture.

Football fans across the globe can follow their team throughout the season with a ‘dynamic’ service, with game entries updating automatically in the calendar, as the fixture changes throughout the season.

Entries feature localised television and radio broadcast information for live tune-in and one-click access to team shops, apps and twitter for social engagement with fellow football fans.

The Premier League season will kick off on August 8th with newly promoted Brentford facing a tough assignment first up on the big stage against Arsenal at The Emirates.

Will Manchester be painted blue or red this season? Will Jürgen Klopp have Liverpool firing on all cylinders? Follow your favourite team like millions of fans all around the world throughout the season here, and stay up-to-date and connected thanks to ECAL.

Ticketek has announced that The Tony®, Grammy®, Olivier and Pultizer Prize winning musical Hamilton is coming to Melbourne!

Featuring a score that blends hip-hop, jazz, R&B and Broadway, HAMILTON has taken a story of American founding father Alexander Hamilton and created a revolutionary moment in theatre – a musical that has had a profound impact on culture, politics, and education.

With tickets yet to go on sale, theatre goers are being encouraged to join the Hamilton waitlist to be the first to get the latest Hamilton news, event and ticket information.

Fans can ‘sync’ important ticket release dates, including pre-sale tickets available to Telstra Plus members and general public on-sale dates straight to their digital calendars. With timely reminders and one click access to purchase, don’t miss your opportunity to grab your tickets to Hamilton.

The revolution is coming. Be there when it happens! Sync Hamilton ticket on-sale dates here!

Cricket Australia has released its full men’s and women’s international schedule for 2021-22 season.

England, India, Afghanistan, New Zealand and Sri Lanka will all play on Australian shores, with cricket’s oldest rivalry headlining an historic Australian international summer schedule.

Thanks to ECAL, fans can receive a live and dynamic feed of match details, delivered straight to their digital calendar of choice. Cricket lovers will never miss a moment with match entries automatically updated with TV broadcast information, official game hashtags and direct access to Buy Tickets, Online Shop and more, just a click away.

Australia will look to retain the Ashes on home soil, with the 2019 series drawn with England and Australia each claiming two test wins. The First test kicks off on December 8th at the Gabba.

You can follow the Australian mens and womens cricket teams this Summer with ECAL, sync the Aussie fixtures here.

ECAL enhances its customer experience with fast and frictionless payments from the calendar.

ECAL, the world’s leading direct to calendar marketing platform, are excited to announce a ground-breaking new addition to their sync-to-calendar technology, that allows users to make purchases directly from their calendar.

Introducing Hyper, a digital payments wallet and ID enrichment feature. It is designed to enable ECAL publishers and their merchants to deliver a hyper-personalised product offer to users at the right time, in their personal digital calendar, with a fast and frictionless checkout experience.

Consider a calendar entry for a football game of your favourite team, with a special offer presented five minutes prior to stream the game live on your mobile. Or a concert of your favourite artist, with a special offer for VIP tickets available 30 minutes prior to the general on-sale. All secured and paid for in just a few clicks directly from the calendar on your mobile. This is an exciting opportunity for ECAL and Hyper clients wanting to develop a better transactional experience for their customers.

Hyper delivers a personalised, timely and simplified purchase experience, empowering more customers to buy at the moments that matter. It is estimated that Hyper will work at up to double the normal purchase rate for clients currently using ECAL’s sync-to-calendar technology.

Hyper is underpinned by an advanced Level 1 PCI DSS payment orchestration system. It provides merchants with an intuitive and customisable checkout widget, integrates with over 30+ payment gateways, handles multiple currencies, and facilitates a variety of payment methods including single payments, recurring and ‘buy now pay later’ options.

CEO of ECAL, Patrick Barrett, explains the importance of Hyper to the overall customer experience: “ECAL is obsessed with optimising the calendar experience for both our clients and customers. Hyper lets us play a definitive role in the complete customer journey, from initial interest on a client website, right through to successful purchase via a merchant partner, to ultimately streamline the path to purchase – which we find really, really exciting.”

Whilst Hyper is a breakthrough for ECAL, Barrett hints at future opportunities beyond the calendar, saying “Hyper is a sophisticated digital payments wallet, and it provides a powerful solution for any enterprise business with the need to better orchestrate complex, multi-currency, multi-type payments.”

The announcement closely follows the recent appointment of Silicon Valley based technology entrepreneur, Karen Orford, as ECAL’s Global Head of Customer Success.

In what is yet another monumental achievement for parent company, HyperKu, the launch of Hyper wallet is indicative of HyperKu’s principle of investing in technologies that simplify the overall consumer experience for the modern world.

Learn more about Hyper here: https://hyperid.co/

After 61 years away from Formula One, Aston Martin is back on the World Championship grid. Thanks to ECAL, racing fans will never miss a moment of this iconic brand’s return to the racetrack.

ECAL’s ‘Sync to Calendar’ feature provides Aston Martin fans with the world’s best digital calendar service. Race details are updated dynamically throughout the season, complete with localised broadcast information, direct access to the Racetrack Information, Shop, Latest News, Latest Video, Social Media and lots more.

The inclusion of ECAL’s Sync to Calendar forms part of the brands wider strategy to engage and build a connected audience across the globe, where interests lie both on and off the racetrack. Not only can fans sync the full F1 schedule, including pre-race, practice and qualifying events, but the team’s ESports V10 R-League Season 2 schedule, AMF1 Events and Promotions & Offers. ‘Sync to Calendar’ buttons are integrated across the AMF1 website, including homepage and impact displays on individual race page countdown clock tiles.

ECAL’s solution for Aston Martin includes single-sign on registration. Fans must be logged in as a registered member of #IAMF1 in order to start the sync journey. When the sync button is clicked, a pop up will prompt users to login or register as a member.

Single-sign on registration was a key consideration for Aston Martin when choosing ECAL and it will undoubtedly become a highly-sought after feature moving forward according to ECAL CEO Patrick Barrett.

“As publishers invest in single identity management across platforms, it’s important vendor partners like ECAL can support single sign-on to facilitate a consistent, familiar login experience, and uniformity around data and insights for the business.”

Racing fans, don’t miss a moment throughout the 2021 Season and beyond with ECAL. Visit https://www.astonmartinf1.com and register now.

Welcome to the final instalment of our special series on the ‘Superheroes of Sync’! Hopefully you’re inspired and motivated to make the most of your ECAL calendar communications and marketing.

NFHS: Watch it Live!

The NFHS Network provides the official live streaming service for over 25,000+ US high schools. ECAL enables sports fans to sync their favourite school sports to calendar, with smart alerts and prompts to ‘Watch it Live’. The ‘play’ ▶️  and ‘sports’ 🏈  emojis mark the live broadcast, with strong ‘calls to action’ and direct action links to the live stream, geared towards converting free VOD users to paid streaming subscribers. With this smart business logic, the ‘Watch it Live’ link has a CTR of 9%+, with a very high conversion to paid subscription.

Welcome to Week 3 of this special 4-week series, as we highlight the most creative and super engaging calendar marketing campaigns.

NBA: ⚡️Milestone Alerts

The NBA has taken fan engagement to the next level, injecting advanced match stats into game entries with this cool ⚡️ ‘Milestone Alerts’ feature! Whether it’s Carmelo Anthony moving into 95th spot for All-Time total rebounds or LeBron James tying Paul Silas and Tony Parker for 32nd on the NBA All-Time games list, the NBA is giving fans more of the moment! Watch out for the ⚡️ symbol in game titles to uncover important player milestones!

This special 4-week series highlights some of the most creative and super engaging calendar campaigns we’ve seen lately. Great ideas, fantastic executions, awesome results. Here’s Week 2!

TAB: Virtual Locker Room

To help racing and sports fans navigate a hectic spring betting calendar, and the constraints of Covid-19 lockdown, TAB invited Aussies to ‘Make a Date with Play’. At the heart of the campaign, ECAL enabled sports fans to sync their favourite sports fixtures and feature racing events to calendar. To help bring mates together, users could create a Virtual Locker Room (a private virtual room), complete with live vision, odds boards, video chat and more. What an amazing campaign!

ECAL’s Superheroes of Sync are here! This special 4-week series highlights some of the most creative and super engaging calendar campaigns we’ve seen from our clients. Great ideas, fantastic executions, awesome results. Check out this week’s Superheroes!

FC Barcelona: Match Day Challenge

FCB launched a ‘Match Day Challenge’ promotion to increase fan engagement and participation online. With the opportunity to win a match day jersey, fans are encouraged to ‘Guess the Score’, ‘Enter a Quiz’, and ‘Rate the Game’ for each upcoming game. FCB leverage their calendar audience via a dedicated tactical entry delivered one day prior to the game, and the ‘On!’ 🔛 emoji announces the ‘Match Day Challenge’ is open. FCB has seen a 3x increase in engagement via the calendar!