Choice Hotels Asia-Pac has renewed its partnership with the National Basketball League for the NBL27 season, extending its role as the league’s Official Hotel Partner across Australia and New Zealand.
The renewed agreement builds on the first season of the partnership and reinforces Choice Hotels’ push to connect its regional accommodation network with sport-led travel demand. The arrangement is designed to support travelling fans, players, coaching staff, junior teams and the wider basketball community, while giving Choice Hotels greater visibility across one of Australia’s fastest-growing sporting platforms.
For Choice Hotels, the partnership sits at the intersection of three important hospitality trends: event travel, loyalty engagement and regional accommodation demand. Basketball’s national footprint creates regular movement between cities and regional centres, generating stay occasions that go beyond the traditional leisure or corporate travel categories. Supporters travel for away games, families move between tournaments, teams require consistent accommodation options, and the sport’s community base provides a recurring audience for hotel brands that can offer convenience and value.
The renewal will see Choice Hotels continue to position its portfolio as a practical accommodation option for NBL-related travel across Australia and New Zealand. The group’s regional presence and multi-brand structure give it the ability to serve different travel needs, from fans seeking affordable stays to teams and families requiring reliable accommodation close to venues, transport links and tournament locations.
The partnership also gives Choice Hotels a channel through which to deepen engagement with Choice Privileges members. As part of the renewed agreement, the hotel group is expected to launch a platform offering members new opportunities to get closer to the league through experiences and rewards. This shifts the partnership beyond static sponsorship and into loyalty-led activation, where basketball becomes a way to drive bookings, brand recall and member participation.
NBL Group Chief Partnerships Officer Shenae Beus said the renewal builds on a successful first season between the two organisations. She said the league was pleased to extend the relationship for NBL27, noting that Choice Hotels provides a trusted and convenient accommodation option for fans travelling to support their team, families heading away for junior tournaments, and members of the basketball community travelling for work and leisure.
Beus added that the NBL is seeing more fans than ever before, and that partnerships of this kind help improve the fan experience while supporting the broader basketball ecosystem. That framing is important. For the NBL, accommodation is not simply a commercial partner category. It is part of the infrastructure that supports the movement of supporters, clubs and basketball families across a national competition.
Kari Hunter, Senior Director of Commercial and Revenue Management at Choice Hotels Asia-Pac, said the hotel group is continuing and growing a successful partnership with the NBL. She said the collaboration integrates the two organisations while boosting visibility and bookings for Choice Hotels’ six hotel brands across Australia and New Zealand. She also pointed to the value the partnership can provide for fans, players and coaching staff looking for savings and “away game” comfort when travelling.
The commercial logic is clear. Sports partnerships give hotel companies access to predictable travel patterns and emotionally engaged audiences. Unlike one-off brand campaigns, league partnerships can create repeated touchpoints across an entire season, including fixtures, finals, fan trips, junior competitions, grassroots participation and loyalty promotions. For a franchise-led hotel group, that can translate into both brand exposure and direct occupancy opportunities for properties in relevant markets.
Choice Hotels has already been positioning sport travel as a meaningful channel. Its Choice Sports Travel Program offers registered sports clubs discounts off best available rates and rebates back to clubs, creating a model that links accommodation spend with grassroots fundraising. In the context of the NBL partnership, that approach gives the hotel group a way to connect elite sport visibility with community-level travel needs.
The timing also reflects a broader shift in hotel marketing. Accommodation brands are increasingly looking for partnerships that create measurable demand rather than broad awareness alone. Sports leagues offer a useful platform because they combine calendar-based travel, community loyalty and destination movement. For hotel operators, the value lies not only in logo placement but in building travel pathways around real guest behaviour.
For the NBL, the arrangement supports its own growth strategy by making travel more accessible for the fans and families who help sustain the league’s momentum. The competition has been working to broaden its audience beyond traditional basketball followers, and accommodation partnerships can help reduce friction for supporters who travel across state lines or combine games with short breaks.
The Hungry Jack’s NBL27 season is scheduled to tip off in September, giving both organisations a clear runway for member promotions, fan travel campaigns and club-linked accommodation activity. The effectiveness of the renewed partnership will depend on how well Choice Hotels turns the sponsorship into tangible booking offers, loyalty experiences and local-market activations.
For now, the extension signals that Choice Hotels sees basketball not just as a sponsorship opportunity, but as a practical route into recurring travel demand. As sport continues to influence short-break behaviour across Australia and New Zealand, hotel groups with distributed networks and loyalty platforms are likely to treat these partnerships as a more important part of their commercial playbook.
