Wed Jul 14 2010

Would you like to increase your golf revenue by 10%?

Early on in my career I was fortunate to have worked at golf facilities in the Los Angeles area that were doing in excess of 100,000 rounds annually at an 18-hole facility. We learned a lot about "Demand and Revenue management" along with "Revenue Generation" strategies. We had fixed green rates due to council ownership, so to grow the revenue lines we had to devise ways to increase the individual spends of each and every player that came through our place. A .50c per player increase would equate to $50k of incremental spend at the end of the year. During our "slower" periods (which weren't often) we had to entice player to come to our course, either by a discount or some other kind of special offer.

I wont get into the whole demographics or geographic location and how this may impact on player numbers, but will focus more on the fact that most courses out there have 'peak' periods when your extra busy and have too much demand and turn people away and then we have 'troughs' of when we are scrapping to find players. Hence the discounts we see on the ever popular online booking sites. If not properly managed you will lose money in both of these occasions unless you have a tee sheet management plan in place.

Airline and hotel booking strategies are used for golf marketing strategies

Do you know if you're charging to much, or in most cases not enough, for green fees and membership? Do you know when your slowest periods are, every day/week of the year? What are you doing to improve this figure? Do you have a dynamic pricing strategy for your course that incorporates seasonality and other issues that impact on players coming to your course? The airlines and hotels use this type of strategy to fill their planes and rooms each day, so why don't you start doing the same thing? Each individual tee time has a different price value attached to it dependent on demand for that particular time.

The most important question of all - Would you like to increase your revenue-line this year by a minimum 10%?

Tee sheet management is one area that golf course managers seem to have the least amount of expertise or give the least amount of focus to at most club's I visit. It's probably because it can be very time consuming and it's such a dynamic process with things potentially changing every day as new bookings occur and others cancel. We all know weather plays a big part in this equation as well. It's not something you can look at once, but actually must be reviewed daily on minimum.  Ideally you are using some kind of electronic tee sheet program to make this important task much easier, but old fashion tee sheets work fine as long as you are tracking who and when people are playing and also importantly what they are paying. The best way to manage this critical part of your business, the part of operations that manages the people playing on your course and contributes the biggest amount of revenue (membership and green fees), is to somehow try and see in the future. We know this is really impossible, but there is an easy and affordable way to do this.

Golf Industry Central has started to provide a new service to golf facilities to help improve their average revenue spend and to increase the amount of players coming to your course. Playing patterns give us the invaluable insight needed for producing strategic marketing and pricing plans for you moving forward. A library of "best practice" are then provided to fill in these gaps in your reservation sheet. This method is the closest way to see the future playing patterns of your specific facility.

If you would like to find out more information regarding this monthly "tee sheet management" support service, please email me at morloff@golfindustrycentral.com.au or call on 0415 682 259. Im happy to have a chat with you to see if its something that would be viable for your particular facility's needs. The review and support is most effective at clubs that allow some external play to access its course, but also works well for fully private clubs.

Written by Mike Orloff, Golf Operations and Revenue Generation Specialist

© Copyright Golf Industry Central 2009

View Weekly Tips Archive