‘Doing What Needs
to Be Done’
Stay, Play Made Simple takes the guesswork out of event housing arrangements
By Ann Piccininni
When teams travel to compete, Stay, Play, Made Simple makes those trips easy to arrange.
“We are a third-party housing service for events,” said Laurie Santel, company owner and founder.
Stay, Play, Made Simple helps deliver temporary housing for youth and adult sports teams, business travelers and convention attendees.
“We have built partnerships with local convention and visitors bureaus where the events are being held. We handle all the hotel accommodations, from start to finish,” she said. “We contract with the hotels. We manage the blocks of rooms. We handle the phone calls to make, cancel and modify the reservations. We are available to receive phone calls all day long.”
With its growth, the company has seen such an increase in incoming calls that the company, which was founded in 2012, now employs three event managers.
With digital technology, teams can block out their own reservations online. Stay, Play, Made Simple takes care of the back-end of that process, ensuring that adequate accommodations will be available for tournaments, weddings, business travelers, family reunions and visiting movie crews.
“We have a pretty sophisticated reservation system,” Santel said. “We send out requests for proposals through the reservation system.”
The West Chester-based company works with hotels throughout the Cincinnati area, both in the suburbs and in the city.
For larger events, Stay, Play, Made Simple sometimes needs to book several hotels.
“We may need to get 1,000 rooms. We go out and contract all those rooms,” she said.
The business is not limited to destinations in Ohio.
“We can work anywhere in the country,” she said. “We handle over 100 events. We have partnerships with all hotel brands. Our relationships with hotels are important. We make sure we do what needs to be done to keep communications open.”
Santel started the business when she recognized the need after being on the participation end of the equation.
“I originally was a parent volunteer for an organization that has a large tournament in the area,” she said. One of her three children, who are all now grown, was active in soccer competitions while another was involved in gymnastic contests.
The company started out as a part-time, side job for Santel, but its success and growth quickly changed that.
“Within a year, I quit my full-time job as an education assistant at a local school district,” she said.
Back then, Santel was operating the company with one other person. Two more employees were added just prior to the emergence of the pandemic. And since then, a fifth person has come on board. The company moved to a new office just before COVID-19 hit, she said, so the ribbon-cutting was deferred until July 2021.
With gatherings of all kinds canceled or curtailed during the pandemic, the company, like so many others, weathered a slow down, but more recently is enjoying a healthy rebound.
“Things are back to more normal. I’m lucky that sports happens to be one of the markets that came back quicker than anything else,” she said.
For more information, visit stayplaymadesimple.com