The Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) has announced a five-year partnership with bounts (www.bounts.it) to become the official supplier of participation rewards.

Bounts will deliver fun and engaging tennis challenges throughout the year to the 500,000+ British Tennis members to encourage more people to play tennis more often. Participants will be able to earn reward points at registered tennis venues across the country and points can be exchanged for vouchers at more than 300 high street retailers and for tennis-specific rewards, such as Davis Cup clothing, tickets and more.

The first bounts challenge will be launched on July 1st during the first Friday of Wimbledon.

LTA Chief Executive Michael Downey said: "The reality of our sport is there are 150,000 fewer people playing per month than there were ten years ago. We know tennis players like to do other activities such as going to the gym and running.

"Through our innovative partnership with bounts we will be able to reward active lifestyles, and people who play more often, as we strive to do our bit towards building an active nation. We will be promoting how easy it is to download the app to our British Tennis Membership, aiming to make it part of the modern tennis playing experience".

John Stuart, CEO and founder of bounts, added: "We are delighted to be the official rewards partner for British Tennis and to be working with the LTA. At bounts, via our 3.5 million strong membership, we have proven that our rewards system, combined with our challenges and simplicity of use of the app encourages people to exercise more and for longer and to take up different activities. We believe that we will see the same results with British Tennis members over the next five years".

In 2015 the LTA ran a pilot scheme with bounts across four venues (three London Boroughs and Eastbourne) from May to September. Alongside this 2,662 LTA registered venues were ‘geofenced’ – using technology to create a virtual fence which allows the user to prove that they were in the area and qualify for points. This was in fact the biggest geofencing exercise in the world at that time.

Results showed a strong appetite for the app amongst 21-49 women. Tennis activity was recorded at 681 tennis venues that were 'geo fenced', showing an interest far beyond the four pilot areas. The LTA ran two tennis challenges which drove an increase in tennis participation numbers, and increased player frequency.

In one of the challenges, bounts was able to encourage over 25% of bounts members in that specific area to participate in tennis who had not previously recorded any tennis activity on bounts.