A few days back, ESPN.com and Orbitz.com, a leading online travel agency, launched ESPN Sports Passport powered by Orbitz – an online community tool that gives sports fans a place to catalog and share their sports travel trips, game memories and milestones. ESPN Sports Passport fans will be able to create and share an online catalog of their sports history, travel experiences and memories via blogs, photo and video sharing, stadium collections and more. Through various tools on the site, fans can add comments and rate individual users’ Passport logs. The site will also publish rankings of the most accomplished fans’ attendance histories.
The Sports Travel Passport integrates seamlessly with ESPN’s robust SportsNation online community and utilizes the same registration and ESPN Fan Profiles used by fans. Fans can catalog their first game or track how many games they have seen your home team win. Fans can now keep track of every professional or collegiate event they have ever attended, describe their memories of the game, upload photos and even link directly to the boxscore from the game.
ESPN and Orbitz have collaborated on ESPN Sports Travel since 2006, providing fans with tools and content aimed at creating utility by combining two subjects people are passionate about: sports and travel. The section provides city profiles for more than 75 North American, Latin American and European sports destinations, city-specific sports calendars, stadium profiles and information, sports travel feature stories, trip ideas, travel planning information and easy access to Orbitz’s tools to book hotels, vacation packages, flights and destination services.
Recently, Orbitz Worldwide, Inc. had reported a Q2 loss of $0.06, 3 cents lower than the analyst estimate of ($0.03). Revenues for the quarter were $231 million, versus the consensus of $233.68 million.
Web 2.0 seems to be everywhere and now even traditional companies are trying hard to gather momentum off the users’ experiences. Although such an initiative is, admittedly, a quite commendable and ambitious one, what worries me is the very niche audience that such a community targets. One of the sets belong to Travellers and the other to Sports fans. Combining them both, the final piece of the pie seems to be too small to even qualify for an evening snack.
What do you think? How much of social interaction, do you think, can such a platform generate, in the long run?
Great post that covers the subject matter in detail