Municipal Golf: New Technologies Combine with Old Truths to Generate Demand in a Diminished Market
September 29, 2016
By Chris May
The landscape of public golf has changed dramatically over the past decade, and not just the color of the fairways.
In the mid-2000s, public golf was enjoying a period of unprecedented demand. Fueled by the incredible run of Tiger Woods on the professional circuit, a robust economy and the popularity of the sport among corporate ranks. Making a weekend reservation at a municipal or other public facility could prove to be an arduous task.
If a foursome didn’t want to draw straws among themselves to send a representative to the pro shop in person at 5 AM or earlier to secure a spot for the following week, they had to take their chances getting through to the starter on the phone before all the prime times were taken.
Singles and twosomes often weren’t permitted to make reservations at all. Instead, they had to show up at first light and take their chances on the waitlist, milling about the practice tee or coffee shop hoping for their name to be called to fill out a short group or last minute cancellation. An alternative option was to join the course’s in-house men’s or women’s club. By showing up to the monthly member meeting, one could at least secure a spot with a guaranteed time in the monthly member tournament.
An operator during those heady times didn’t have to think at all about creating demand. As long as the course was in reasonable shape and someone was on property to open the pro shop doors on time, the tee sheet was going to be full.
The best revenue strategy to undertake was one of demand management – making sure that the starters were adept at filling short groups with those singles on the waitlist and keeping the tee reasonably on time.
A savvier operator might try and forecast the percentage of tee times that no-showed each day and overbook by a corresponding amount – a strategy that backfired when every guest showed up. The resulting delays would invariably upset certain guests, but at the end of the day, there was always someone else in line behind the disgruntled customer, clubs in hand and ready to play.
Today, the landscape is dramatically different. The economy continues its struggle to recover from the Great Recession, and the number of people participating in the game has declined. Golf course numbers have been shrinking as well, but at a slower rate than the decline of golfers, leading to fewer golfers chasing more available tee times.
These changes in the golf market have already trickled down to affect customer behavior.
Waitlists are a thing of the past, singles can pick up their phones and instantaneously book a time through their app of choice. Club participation is dwindling as older members age out, greater tee time availability lessens the value of club membership and younger persons are attracted to more technologically savvy forms of affiliation. On top of it all, if a customer has a negative experience, he or she can quickly blog about it on the latest social media outlet.
With these changes in customer base and behavior, operators have had to become more sophisticated in their revenue strategies to have any hope of keeping abreast of water and labor costs that increase much faster than the Consumer Price Index, another challenging feature of the post Great Recession era. Demand management doesn’t work if there’s no demand to manage. The golf course operator’s focus has now been almost exclusively on demand creation and customer retention.
Demand creation comes down to asking what the customer wants and giving it to him.
This may seem obvious, but it is a lot easier to say than to do. Doing it, requires that the relationship between the course and the customer flip from a transactional one to a relational one – a feat that requires an operator’s workforce to imbibe a bit of a cultural transformation.
Individual customers value the different components of their overall experience. Price, course conditions and pace of play are now among the things that make or break an operator, and the only way to learn what these customers want is to ask them. Knowing the customer allows the operator to start providing a more personalized approach to each guest, whether it be through personal interaction with course staff or online survey tools.
For example, price sensitive customers desire messaging about daily specials. The operator can influence when that customer plays through dynamic pricing strategies or by being more creative with the underutilized parts of their daily inventory.
Customers that value a quick round may be willing to join a membership that allows access to advance booking windows or enroll in a rewards program that allows them to play early, as long as they meet a pace goal.
The experiential buckets that customers fit into will vary at every property, but the best practice is the same – a property’s customer should not all be receiving the same marketing message. Ultimately, when the customer sees an ongoing attempt by the operator to deliver on their individual wants and needs, a sense of trust begins to develop.
Fostering that sense of trust with each guest is what leads to reliable customer retention. This important piece of the guest relationship was missing in yesterday’s industry – ironically when it was the busiest. However, with advances in tee sheet and customer surveying technology, pleasing a course’s clientele is now easier than ever to accomplish.
The industry managed to do it during the game’s formative years, when demand was much leaner and technological support was practically non-existent; it can certainly pivot back to the future and do it again.
Chris May is the Revenue Development Manager for the American Golf Corporation, the largest golf management company in California.