Australian Open 2010 Update

The world’s hottest tennis players return to Melbourne Park in January, 2010, when the Australian Open tennis hits town. Sportsnet holidays have been flat out producing the best Australian Open packages for the event & I am happy to say we are caning last years figures (thanks everyone).
Roger Federer returns after a successful year in which he completed his career Grand Slam, whilst Rafael Nadal will be back to defend his throne as Aust Open Champion, as will Serena Williams. Australian Open tickets will be at a premium as young guns like Del Potro, Djokovic, Murray, Ivanovic, Dementieva and Safina aspire to the crown, as Australia’s own Lleyton Hewitt, Bernard Tomic and Sam Stosur try to do us proud on Rod Laver Arena.
Will we see a repeat of last years epic Mens Final battle between Fed and Rafa, or renewed hostilities between the Williams sisters and the Russians? My money in on Kim & Justine to make the front page in the first week and with wild cards you could see them close up in the outer courts . I am having a break before the tennis as we have hundreds of tickets to get out and there are always loads of last minute bookings once Hopman Cup & the feeder tournaments like Medibank & Hobart kick in. So I dont need to remind you not to wait until its kicked off to book as it will be tight in 2010 judging on business volumes to date.

2010 Basketball World Championship Draw

2010 FIBA World Championship Basketball Draw in Istanbul Australia has drawn in Group A with Argentina, Serbia, Germany, Angola and Jordan. Package is currently through Show but we are hoping to do our own to compliment our Sportsnet Holidays NBA All Stars Weekend package
Turkey is a great destination and it is Boomers & Opals together in a location where you are a bus ride from Galipoli and a ferry ride from the Greek Island need I say more......

Motor Sports are keeping me busy.

It been a busy time for Sportsnet Holidays favorite friends “petrol heads” of all kinds. The Bathurst 1000 has been a sold out success for us 2010. This year’s Malaysian MotoGP at Sepang was our best to date, then we sold out our Philip Island MotoGP offer and to top it off the good weather turned up and Casey burned up the track in his come back on home soil. This weekend was the Gold Coast V8 Supercars or is it the NitroGP or Surfers Paradise V8s or maybe it’s the Queensland A1GP or the Gold Coast Indy 300? Email me if you can work it out. I was offered a spot on a boat moored just off the start/finish line by my good mate John at CruiseawayHolidays.com.au but I didn’t take it (kids cricket match) as it turned out this weekend as far as thrills and spills goes was a cracker and I am kicking myself. Putting aside our flurry of last min Derby Day Packages and the 2010 Australian Open Tennis, we have Clipsal 500 out for next year, we have the Townsville 400 up which was a sell out for us last year and we have just made a big booking for the Hamilton 400 V8 in NZ today (AB take a bow). For those who like their open wheel racing and still feel let down by the whole A1GP farrago our Melbourne Grand Prix packages are getting a bit of traction so don’t spend too long thinking about it. While I can’t promise the Gold Coast grid girls or the Surfers Paradise beach front I reckon this year’s evening race format for the 2010 Australian Grand Prix will be a scorcher.

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The Ashes 2010 Dates, Ashes Series 2010-11

The Ashes 2010 dates have been released for the Ashes Series 2010 Gabba Nov 25
Adelaide Dec 3
Perth Dec 16.
Melbourne Dec 26-30
Sydney Jan 3

The Boxing day test 2010 Melbourne at the MCG that is the one which will be the make or break if it is 2 to 1 1 all and draw 2 draws etc

I already have the Sportsnet Holidays Ashes Cricket Series 2010-11 page up for registrations. I think Ashes cricket tours that have Ashes tickets and Cricket tour friendly hotels will be massive. Imagine if England could retain the 2010-11 Ashes in Australia. I can not imagine what would happen if it was at the boxing day test. I think most Aussie cricket fanatics would opt for a New Zealand passport rather than lose the Ashes at the G.

Spring into action

September always heralds a period of madness in the sports travel business as it means we literally spring into action and it rarely pauses until after the Australian F1 Grand Prix in late summer.

September means footy finals and we have huge numbers for the AFL Grand Final packages and NRL Grand Final packages. There are a few late nights coming up with last minute bookings as fans realize their team is going to get there and as we assemble hundreds of travel packs with grand final tickets, hotels documents and various other goodies while organizing our Sportsnet functions and speakers.

As that one day in September (or early October) passed for both codes there is no time to take a breather as hard on the heels of footy is the Philip Island Moto GP event and the Bathurst V8 races. Both events have something challenging in common for a sports travel company. They are in the country; there is limited accommodation and huge demand. We had booked out most of our top flight accommodation in and around both events months ago. No matter how hard you want to please the fans, at this time of year you are either staying up in Melbourne and transferring down to the track or looking at dorm accommodation around Bathurst for the Mount Panorama races. That all said it never seems to distract the fans from the enjoying what they really came for the sights, sounds and smell of motor sports.

“Oh to be in England” (well Britain actually), it is not often that you will hear anyone who lives in the beautiful Melbourne saying, “oh to be in England” but if you are a sports fan and a traveller you can’t help looking enviously at the British summer of sport. They have Formula One drivers taking pole position and winning F1 meets. They have had a compelling Wimbledon Tennis Tournament with their own man Andy Murray nearly going the distance. They have the Ashes which is shaping up to be a sensational final match with plenty of grudge and controversy,that’s the way we like it. The British Open Championship Golf has been on and the course looks like it has been cut out of picture book, sophisticated magnificent & lush. As if that is not all their man Cavendish has been tearing up the sprints in the Tour De France and grabbing the headlines. Even on the bikes the three cylinder Triumph is ripping it up on the track. To make matters worse we Aussies have gone down to the Kiwis in the Bledislow Cup when even the UK Lions have managed a few wins. If you are still up for a bit of self torture the EPL is on this weekend.

So what is the good news? Summers is just around the corner and I live in Melbourne and let me tell you it does not get any better than this in a single city of just over 3 million! We have: the Phillip Island Moto GP, the Australian Masters Golf in Melbourne the Tour Down Under with Lance Armstrong and a host of Aussies cyclists, The Australian Open and the soon to be announced dates for the Australian Grand Prix. If I had a friend called Willis I’d be tempted to say, “That’s what I am talking about!”

US Open Tennis Travel

There is one more Grand Slam to go for 2009 and as far as tennis travel goes the US Open at Flushing Meadows is not really a big one for us. Don’t get me wrong, I would love it to be as big as our Wimbledon Packages or our French Open travel and we definitely get enquiries. Each year we do a limited number of customised individual tennis travel packages built around the US Open, I just want to do more of them. The US Open should be huge after all it is the last one of the year, it is in New York (officially one of, if not the safest city in America) and it is summer time.

I have lived in New York both on Manhattan and in Queens and it is a special place on the planet for the sports traveller, the cultural sophisticate or the fan of popular culture. I love my Architecture and Modernist Art, after all that true Aussie Icon the Blue Polls was painted in New York. As for popular culture, most of us have a soft spot for either Seinfeld, Sex in the City or any of the Dick Wolf crime dramas.

This year you can get to New York for about $1000 as the deregulation of the trans-pacific air routes and the GFC have put fares in a tail spin, it is not too late to go! If you can’t make New York and most of us can’t get in early for the first of grand slam of 2010 The Australian Open. Australian Open tickets with travel packages have been on sale for a while and six months out is not too early to secure a great hotel and Australian Open Finals tickets as 2010 will see more of old guard or the next wave of hero’s.

AFL Grass roots footy

Kids are doing the Kevin Sheedy Footy Camp in Melbourne this week. It is based in Parkville and its kids from tackas to teens and all between. Interesting there is also a residential program at International House for country and interstate kids that seems popular.

So what has a kids Aussie Rules camp got to do with sports travel and sports tours? Well I spend allot of time online at http://www.sportsnetholidays.com trying to sell AFL travel packages to Melbourne and AFL Grand Final Packages, and when I am not doing selling AFL Grand Final ticket packages on the site I am doing it in Google. All in all it is technical and a lot of time. So it was great to see the kids out there having fun in one of the few times that I have seen that grass roots footy comes together with mainstream AFL.

There were a heap of players & coaches there helping the kids and having fun. How often does a kid get to talk to Presty form the Pies or do a ruck drill with Eddie Betts ? It is not often you see Pagan or Laidley looking relaxed but they were (according to my kids). It was bugging me, why is this so different what is the buzz that is so good around the place. I have been to allot of footy with my boys, the feel was not professional footy like AFL home and away or Port Melbourne vs. The Bullants ,and it wasn’t NAB Auskick or Fitzroy Junior Football Club vs. Brunswick or The Community Cup.

I still don’t know what it is but I think it was the real footballers (kids and a few wide eyed Dads) & the young guys running the Kevin Sheedy Footy Camp combined with the professional footballers and coaches together in a non commercial atmosphere. Everyone was having fun, no press, no sponsors, no logos, no booze, no boff heads and hangers on, just youngsters enjoying their footy and grown up youngsters now living the dream as players & coaches.

2009 Moto GP travel

You either like bikes or you don't, if you do like bikes then is it road bikes or dirt bikes, if it is road bikes you probably have a specific preference for a brand, a style, an era and so on. Bike people are pretty difficult to pin down. So for all my fellow bike fans out there this post is about travelling to the Moto GP. We send people to events all around the world on a request basis but in the case of Malaysia and Australia we organise the "full monty" an end to end package with; hotels, transfers, track access and a function ( Wayne Gardner at Phillip Island this year).

We do the Phillip Island bikes because it is in Australia, it is in our state and we love it. The Malaysian Moto GP we do because every year as we get more requests for this event than we do for Hungary or any of the big Spanish GP events.

The thing I think that makes the GP event so interesting for the traveller is that like the V8 Supercars you can get on a similar machine to the bikes you are following, you can ride the track at Phillip Island, buy the gear and have a real sense of the event or the race. With F1 and other events I dont get to feel so close to the actual event experience. You don't get to feel like Jesen Button on the street in your 2004 Celica but being on the open road on your Aprilla is another matter.

I am of course forgetting the fans you gotta love your Moto GP fan. The events have a sort of out door music festival buzz about them except that everyone is eyeing off everyone else's gear & bikes in the parking area.

Travel to South Africa for the World Cup

The challenge of booking travel to the World Cup in South Africa.

There are lots of sporting world cups and they usually include the name of the sport in the title however with soccer it is just “The World Cup”. I am assuming that this is because it was the first World Cup and is still the biggest of all of them all.

Travelling to the world cup or the soccer world cup (if you have a preference for another code) for most people is a once in a life time experience to be there. For Australians fans the Socceroos are enjoying a purple patch that may not last forever so going to the world cup has added importance as other nation’s wait decades or longer to re qualify and we have had two in row. The challenges for the soccer fanatic who is prepared to dig deep to see the green and gold army take on the world are many. It is in South Africa which is a new destination for most people, it is on a continent few of us have ever been to or thought we could afford to travel to. We don’t know a lot about South Africa, why do they have three capitals for instance I mean Canberra alone is enough for anyone what did those guys do so wrong they got three lots of politicians? So how do we make sure that when we try to book travel to South Africa we don’t get rolled like all those people who bought Olympic tickets off the net or people who got scalped in Germany!

So here are my ten tips for booking world cup travel.

· Firstly, look for companies that are MATCH appointed operators as they have been sanctioned to sell tickets. These sites usually have permission to use the official logos.
· Secondly, make sure the company is in Australia on New Zealand otherwise you will have no recourse to legal action.
· Thirdly, make sure they have a travel agents license on their web site, you can always phone consumer affairs to check or look on the official industry pages to make sure they are real.
· Fourthly, see if they are members of tour organizations like CATO (council of Australian Tour Operators) and the TCF (Travel Compensation Fund).
· Fifth, see if you can find them in white pages, normal companies that have a track record are in the phone book.
· Sixth, check they have a street address as real companies who are honest and up front declare who they are and where they are.
· Seventh, check them out on Google Maps or even Google Street view just to make sure.
· Eighth, give them a call, do they answer the phone in the name of the company they advertise the package as, if they don’t this could be just a side business’s and they aren’t experts.
· Ninth, read the small print of the offers to ensure it includes match tickets, hotels of the standard you want and access to travel arrangements between the grounds.
· Tenth, The World Cup is in Africa you need: a ticket to get there above all else, to get Jabs from your Doctor (its Africa) a good insurance policy (its Africa) and a passport (its Africa).

Don’t forget it suppose to be fun.

Tennis Travel & Sportsnet Holidays Banners

I got this photo off our Sportsnet Holidays facebook site. It was taken during the 2009 Australian Open and I am angling to use it in our Australian Open 2010 marketing. As the enquires are starting to flow for Wimbledon 2009 and The French Open I was thinking how I would love to see one of our role out banners at either event. While they are great for the Open in Melbourne where the fans have alot of fun they don't seem very Lawn Tennis or Roland Garros.

We also just got a new offical image for the 2010 Hopman Cup I have been pleasantly suprised by how many people have got themselves organised to sign up for the Hopman Cup and The 2010 Australian Open.

Sports travel is the best reward or incentive to use in product promotions or loyalty programs.

One of the fun things about being involved with a successful sports travel and sports tours company is getting involved with sports personalities and the media. Most people do get a thrill (me included) when they see something they have done, organised or been in appear in the media. We have always tried to develop relationships with marketing companies and brands who are looking for product promotions and prizes to utilise in a marketing campaign or to use for their loyalty and incentive marketing.

I read a survey once that basically said employees and customers like; time off, cash or travel as a reward or incentive. While there is plenty of big travel brands out there we have made a great niche for ourselves combining sports and travel for use in loyalty programs and product promotions and it's allot of fun. Lets face it we all like to travel and we all like to attend big name events. So last year I had the buzz of walking around a supermarket chain knowing we were the guys sending the prize winner to their choice of one of the worlds greatest sporting events. Similarly I also got the buzz each time I opened a certain chocolate bar to see another one of our promotions which included a well known local TV personality, what can I say chocolate, travel, sport and celebrity, if only i could have got red wine in there it would have been near perfect.

Although we have developed a good rapport with a TV station and a couple of well known incentive marketing agencies you don't get many employee incentive bookings or household name product promotions is a week but when they come it really adds to the buzz about the place, if only I could stick our brand name all over them then everything would be perfect.

We got a few on the boil at the moment, a large building company supplier and Pedders is being rolled out right now.

What do you think ? Are sports travel experiences the best way to promote a product or develop customer and staff loyalty ?

2009 Australian Grand Prix will be a winner.

The first Grand Prix event of 2009 is now within sight and there is lots of concern about how the Global Financial crisis will affect the Aussie Grand Prix event.
If the Australian Open Tennis is anything to go by then it will go off. The tennis was packed, Melbourne was really humming and despite 40C plus days the stars really turned it on.
We had our biggest year for the tennis ever and even ended up with Wimbledon and French Open bookings as a result of all the online enquires so I think the Grand Prix will be a scorcher.
Why will it work ? The tennis has helped to focus the publics’ sporting eye on Melbourne which always helps. The Australian Formula One Grand Prix is the first race of the year so for petrol heads like us there are new cars, new teams, new gear for the fans and plenty of low down on who is doing what, where and with whom. The race has had a bit of a makeover after being re-secured for Melbourne which will give it a lift. The Albert Park Grand Prix course is a classic with a good balance between a street circuit like the Monaco GP and a track like the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. The prepping of the track kicks off this month which really builds the buzz. Moving the Melbourne F1 to the end of March will make it less likely to be really hot and with Easter around the corner numbers should be up were as in previous years it had been hard on the heels of the tennis and the AFL pre-season competition and in life, as in sport, timing is everything. There are some more concrete indicators that this year it will go well for Grand Prix travel and these are; we have had more advance bookings this year than in other years and the enquires are there even before the big guns have started with all the PR and marketing bizzo. So I think the pessimists be dammed, the 2009 Australian Grand Prix should get the numbers, maybe not the corporate clients but so what, it’s the fans, the teams and the drivers that make an event not how many accountants turn up. With so many international sporting events in Europe and the America’s it’s a great time of year for us, after the Melbourne Grand Prix it is into Asia with the 3 S’s, Sepang (Malaysian Grand Prix), the Singapore F1 and Shanghai and with only a 2 hour time difference meaning we can watch it live without getting up a 4am, so bring on the 2009 GP season.

AFL Travel in 2009

A few years ago we had an article published in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald about home and away AFL travel and we have just finished putting together some AFL Travel Packages for 2009 AFL home and away season. So what has changed since then? The main difference is the internet. In the old days it was print adds, marketing lists with phone numbers and contacts with in clubs. These days it is mostly online and it is easier and cheaper than ever to travel interstate to watch the footy. There is a huge range of airfares that suit the footy, more airlines are traveling to Melbourne, there are more hotels to choose from and importantly “the weekend away” is firmly entrenched in the minds of the footy fan. These days there is so much more to do before and after the game. If you drive over from Adelaide or down from NSW and the ACT it is more than just coming to Melbourne for the game. In 2009 it is about seeing the sites like Eureka Sky Deck, eating out before the game, visiting a few bars, doing a bit of factory outlet or laneway shopping. It seems there is always a sizeable number of interstate footy fans in club colours at the Vic Market every Saturday or Sunday. The venues themselves have caught on and offer more and more. The latest is the new National Sports Museum at the G, the park between the G and the city has really come into its own and there are now masses of entertainment, accommodation and eating options around the Dome and Southern Cross station both before and after the game as well as a million opportunities to spend a fortune while you are in the venue. Gone are the days of a motel in Brunswick and a wet and windy tram ride to Princess Park with fish and chips on Sydney Road on the way home, nice memories but I am enjoying the modern creature comforts and the modern game.