ESPN.com, Orbitz Launch ESPN Sports Passport Community for Fans to Share Sports Experiences

ESPN Sports Passport Powered By Orbitz Helps Fans Organize and Share Sports Travel Memories and Milestones

ESPN.com and Orbitz.com, a leading online travel agency, today 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. This new online resource is the latest addition to ESPN Sports Travel Powered by Orbitz.

“ESPN Sports Travel has been a fantastic, collaborative success that has served sports fans and travelers extremely well for two years,” said Marc Horine, vice president, digital partnerships, ESPN Digital Media. “With this new effort, we’re going to extend the collaboration beyond just ESPN and Orbitz – to our passionate users, by harnessing the power of new Web technologies and using them to tap into the inherently social aspects of both sports and travel.”

”Orbitz has always been ahead of the curve in offering new innovations to enhance the travel experience,” said Aaron Cooper, Group Vice President of Online Marketing for Orbitz Worldwide. “Through our continued partnership with ESPN.com, fans can not only book a trip to see their favorite team, they can share and compare their experience and memories with fans around the world.”

With ESPN Sports Passport fans are 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. 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.

The features and tools of ESPN Sports Travel Passport powered by Orbitz aim to help fans:

* Preserve Memories. 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.

* Compete & Rate. Fans can see how their status as a fan stacks up against your friends or other ESPN users. ESPN’s Sports Travel Passport powered by Orbitz will tell fans their rank for both events attended and stadiums visited.

* Collect. Not every fan competes – but some take in a game at every venue in a particular sport. Passport has a place for these sports travel explorers. It can help track total venues for each sport, defunct venues and venues that a fan has yet to visit.



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.