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.

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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.

After a hugely successful first edition of the EA SPORTS FIFA 20 tournament, a new group of Premier League footballers and special guests will be putting their skills to the test in the second ePremier League Invitational tournament.

This week’s tournament (Tuesday May 5th – Saturday May 9th) will follow the same format, with the winners of four first-round ties joining the other 12 clubs in the last 16. Each match-up is streamed live on the Premier League website and social platforms, including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

With the help of ECAL, Football and E-sports fans won’t miss a moment of the action, with the Premier League digital calendar providing up-to-date details of the match-ups throughout the knockout phases and finals, with handy alerts, details and direct access to watch live, all from the convenience of your personal calendar.

E-Sports fan? Sync the ePL Invitational schedule here.

STACK SPORTS (SPORTSTG) PARTNER WITH ECAL
Sports fixtures delivered, straight to the digital calendar 

Stack Sports (SportsTG), the leading provider of digital solutions to national, state, grassroots and professional sporting organisations across Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom has today announced an exciting partnership with ECAL, the leading calendar communications and marketing software business.

ECAL’s dynamic ‘sync to calendar’ functionality will deliver the latest sports fixture information, straight to the personal digital calendar of users, to keep them up-to-date and connected. This solution will become a standard feature on the Stack Sports competition management platform.

Anthony Richardson, Director of Digital for Stack Sports), said: “ECAL’s offering compliments the existing features of our products and solutions. Stack Sports continues to evolve our business and product set and we are excited to have partnered with ECAL whose offering will now benefit Stacks customers.”

Patrick Barrett, CEO/Founder of ECAL said: “We are thrilled to partner with Stack Sports, and bring ECAL’s smart calendar technology to the lives of its extensive user community. During these unprecedented times, as competitions begin to reschedule fixtures, accurate and dynamic communications will play an important role in successful competition management. The Stack user community, with the help of ECAL, will be well placed to know exactly what’s on, when and where, so they can better manage life.”

Stack Sports have been providing high quality technology solutions in the Australian market since 2001 along with working in other key markets including the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Stack partners with a large number of National Sporting Organisations including the AFL, Basketball Australia, Touch Football Australia, Hockey Australia, Basketball New Zealand, New Zealand Rugby League, Rugby Football League, and Basketball England.

The technology Stack Sports provides assists in administering everything from national programme registrations to school holiday programs, week to week competitions to digital website solutions, and club sales and revenue-generating eCommerce platforms. Stack Sports will continue to partner with sporting organisations and other bodies to be the leading provider of sports digital ecosystems across the world.

ECAL is a world-leading calendar communications and marketing software business. It’s smart, dynamic ‘Sync to Calendar’ technology is used by 300+ major sports, ticketing, media organisations incl. Premier League, NBA, ICC, LaLiga, Formula E, AFL, NRL, Ticketek, Fox Sports and others, servicing 8M+ users. With over 70% of adults relying on their digital calendar to manage life, effective calendar communications are an essential weapon in the marketing toolkit for events-based business.

For more information and interviews, please contact:

Cameron O’Riordan
Director of Sales & Marketing
Stack Sports – APAC/EMEA
Phone: +61 (0) 475 415 801
cameron.oriordan@stacksports.com

Patrick Barrett
Founder / CEO
ECAL
Phone: +61 (0)411 650 445
patrick@ecal.com

Aston Villa is inviting fans to tune in to the inaugural ePremier League Invitational tournament.

Premier League players from all 20 clubs will put their FIFA skills to the test as they face off against each other, representing their club in a knockout eSports tournament.

With the help of ECAL, Villa fans won’t miss a moment of the action. In Round 1, watch midfielder John McGinn go head-to-head against Brighton & Hove Albion’s French striker Neal Maupay.

Enjoy up-to-date details of the match-ups throughout the knockout phases, with handy alerts, details and direct access to watch live, all from the convenience of your personal calendar.

Villa fan? Sync the ePL Invitational schedule here.

Formula E, the greatest electric street racing series on Earth has gone virtual! In the face of the COVID-19 crisis, the ABB Formula E Race at Home Challenge has been launched – in a fundraising partnership with UNICEF.

This nine week eSports competition will see the world’s greatest Formula E drivers mix it with some of the world’s fastest gamers and influencers. The top gamer wins a real-life track session on a Formula E circuit on a real race weekend.

Donations from the competition will be directed towards UNICEF for urgent PPE gear for health workers, and to help set-up home learning schemes for children out of school.

it’s an exciting and super-engaging format, with each raceday set for Saturday over nine straight weeks. In the lead-up to raceday, the fastest 18 drivers over the course will qualify. They will be joined by top gamers, renowned motorsports players and influencers to battle it out. A ‘Race Royale’ format will see the last placed driver eliminated each lap, until there are just 10 drivers who remain, leaving a single lap sprint to the finish.

The Race at Home Challenge will be available to view live globally on Formula E’s YouTube channel, Facebook page, Facebook Gaming site, Twitch and via @FIAFormulaE on Twitter.

Love your racing, gaming or just keen to follow the action, you can sync the AAB Formula E Race at Home Challenge Series to your digital calendar, thanks to ECAL here.