Walmart offers curated pickleball booking, shopping

Players of the rapidly growing sport of pickleball have a new option to reserve court time and purchase gear.

Walmart is partnering with racquet sports booking platform Break the Love to offer 125,000 comped reservations for Walmart customers and associates. This new collaboration will allow shoppers and employees to book playtime at pickleball venues across the country for free.

In addition, Walmart and Break the Love are now offering a seamless, curated shopping experience, including name-brand pickleball merchandise, directly from Walmart at breakthelove.com/x/walmart.

Other features of Walmart’s new collaborative pickleball program include:

• 25 community events in cities across the country with programming and giveaways.
• Short-form video content featuring pickleball demos, tips and tricks.

• Exclusive offerings for Walmart+ loyalty members, such as first access for peak reservation times, co-branded merchandise, and meet and greets with professional pickleballers.

“We are always looking for ways to create meaningful experiences that encourage our customers to interact with Walmart in new ways,” said Casey Schlaybaugh, VP, brand marketing and strategy for Walmart U.S. “Walmart is dedicated to supporting its customers and their communities, helping them find and have access to everyday opportunities to create moments of joy and connection in their lives.”

“We’re so proud to have built a footprint large enough to be able to partner with a brand as prolific and iconic as Walmart,” said Trisha Goyal, founder, Break the Love. “The company is well recognized for delivering a shopping experience that serves anyone and everyone who walks through their doors. We are also building an experience for the everyday athlete and are thrilled to bring a recreational sport that caters to all skill levels to even more communities through this partnership.”

Walmart adds perks to Walmart+

In addition to offering special benefits from its pickleball program to members of Walmart+, initially launched in September 2020, the retailer has offered several other promotions in the past year or so. Members of the Walmart+ program recently began receiving free access to the “essential” tier of the Paramount+ subscription streaming offering.

In March 2022, Walmart made the program available free to all full- and part-time Walmart U.S. associates working in the company’s stores, distribution centers and fulfillment centers. This added nearly 1.6 million members to the offering.

At that time, the company also began also collaborating with the Spotify music streaming platform to offer a special promotion for Walmart+ members. New and existing Walmart+ members can receive six months of the Spotify Premium content streaming service for free.

Based in Bentonville, Ark., Walmart Inc. operates more than 10,500 stores and numerous e-commerce websites in 20 countries.