AC Sports Eliminates
Team Housing Headaches, Achieves 43% Growth 

In the early days, AC Sports faced significant housing hurdles.
Here are the key pain points:

Low Visibility 

Each team handled their own travel arrangements. Without a centralized system, AC Sports had no easy way to tell if families had booked hotel rooms for upcoming events. 

Inefficient Operations 

Later, the organization adopted point solutions, using different tools for specific tasks. The problem? These platforms didn’t share data. AC Sports spent roughly three hours/week from October to April tracking registrations and bookings on separate systems to ensure teams met stay-to-play requirements.

Sold-Out Hotels 

With hotels near sports venues selling out quickly, many teams stayed at properties more than an hour from their events. The long drives frustrated families and created chaos when schedules changed at the last minute. 

Poor Retention 

These issues raised concerns about customer retention. “Managing team housing takes a lot of time,” DeSantis says. “Instead of planning tournaments, you can end up doing damage control. You don’t want to run outstanding competitions only to lose customers because of bad experiences off the field.”

DeSantis turned to T1 Housing and Staybook to overcome these challenges. Later, he added Playbook365 tournament software.  By combining team housing and event management on a single platform, AC Sports drove strong gains in efficiency and customer satisfaction. 

Real-Time Visibility 

Staybook provides real-time visibility into registrations and housing, delivering an instant snapshot of housing performance in one view. "The integration helps us tremendously,” DeSantis explains. "You can see at a glance if teams haven't booked yet and contact them immediately before hotels sell out." 

Simple Hotel Sourcing 

The solution also provides access to a database with 600,000+ hotels and robust filtering capabilities. T1 can view options for family-friendly properties – with ratings, distances from sports venues, rates, and amenities – in one interface, eliminating guesswork and time-consuming research. 

Branded Booking Engine 

Every AC Sports event has its own branded reservations website to streamline booking. On the backend, Staybook makes it easy to link registrations to room blocks, so teams earn credit for more reservations. 

Custom Communications  

System admins can segment lists and batch-message emails based on the event, division, booking status, and more. Targeted communications spur reservations and keep participants in the loop.

• 43% Business Growth: The increased efficiency gives AC Sports more time to focus on business development and customer experiences, leading to its impressive 43% growth over the past five years.
  
  
• Dramatic Time Savings: Staybook’s unified view cuts stay-to-play tracking time from roughly 3 hours to 5 minutes/week, October - April, for a per-season savings of more than 85 hours.
  
  
• Better Customer Retention: DeSantis says well-organized events with seamless housing increase customer retention and drive more referrals through word-of-mouth recommendations.
  
  
• Geographic Expansion:  The technology enables AC Sports to expand its footprint. Today, the organization runs tournaments throughout Pennsylvania as well as in Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and New York. These events attract teams from 30+ states and Canada.