Local & regional sporting events, concerts, festivals and corporate meetings should offer seamless and localized booking options, but often they don't. If they aren't, they are complicating the overall venue experience for their guest and even missing out highly personalized lodging recommendations.

Customized for Events and Attractions: Ripe defines affiliates as events, attractions or organizations within the same geographic region of a DMO .

Once created, affiliates get a personalized version of the booking engine just for their use by including and sorting only specific properties, customizing maps and even have the option to generate revenue from booking revenue as agreed upon with the DMO.

Personalized for the audience: Ripe-powered affiliates can target marketing efforts more specifically to interested travelers, leveraging local insights and data to promote their events and attractions to the most relevant audience. Once they've education the traveler they can then convert on the lodging reservation, making everyone happy.

The power of partnerships: By being part of a DMO's offering, events and attractions benefit from a synergy with other local entities (accommodations, other attractions), creating a more cohesive and confidence inspiring proposition for their event.

Ripe enables clients to build an unlimited number of custom booking engines for their local affiliates. As an affiliate you can leverage these opportunities to attract bookings as they help answer the “Why Book Here” question for visitors who are already planning to travel. Here’s how to make the most of Ripe’s affiliate functionality:

Affiliate Tools and Customization

Free to qualified affiliates, you can better service travelers and remove all the headaches of managing questions and suggestions one-by-one.
Co-branded booking engine with the client to show authenticity and legitimacy, all free to you.
Start with the full list of available hotels, homes and other properties on the client site and curate to show only those that make sense for you event or organization.
Custom sort order - choose to randomize properties or set a pre-defined sort order, like making sure your "official host hotel" is always at the top.
Custom room blocks and pricing. If you have a room block or negotiated pricing it can be setup and available just like any other property on the site, allowing self-serve checkout for travelers without the need to call the hotel to get the rate.
Custom map pins. Show a custom map pin for your event, stadium, field or start line on the map to give a better sense of distance while travelers are browsing hotels.
Affiliate specific URL. You get a custom URL to use for emails or on your site that will always show your custom affiliate booking engine.
Custom date picker. You can request a custom date picker to embed directly on your site, built to match your brand and colors that will lead travelers directly into your affiliate engine.

Affiliate Best Practices

Always Lead to Ripe Landing Page

Creating a dedicated landing page for all affiliates is the best way to offer a centralized information page for affiliate-related booking. Include "Why Book Here" messaging, value add offers, and other relevant information that attendees may find helpful, such as maps and directions. Always lead users to this landing page or an equivalent before a lodging search results page for best results.

Pre-Populate Dates for Events

Pre-populating dates within your affiliate Ripe Search Widgets ensures visitors are guided directly to search results relevant to their needs, rather than defaulting to generic dates. This simplifies the booking process, whether visitors are coming from an affiliate landing page or another starting point.

Create Relevant Value Add Offers

To enhance the booking experience on your site, curate specific value add offers related to your event. Feature these offers prominently on your Ripe affiliate landing pages and use them in promotional messaging elsewhere.

Partnering with Affiliate Websites

We highly recommend working with affiliate partners to add a booking link to their website. Event organizers often include an informational page about booking stays—adding a link to your booking website enhances convenience for travelers. Remember to always link these travelers to your Ripe landing page first, rather than a search results page immediately.