Scottish golf clubs: Get your members to register with a booking service now

Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish golf clubs are being advised to prepare now for the reintroduction of tee times, after several clubs in England experienced problems due to demand.

Some clubs had to delay their reopening date because a surge in demand meant systems couldn’t cope, while almost every club has said it experienced some issues.

The two biggest software suppliers to golf clubs have both said usage reached unprecedented levels on Monday and Tuesday.

Club Systems International, which recently announced free tee time booking software to golf clubs for the remainder of 2020, to help them deal with the resumption of golf, said 22,000 golfers in England were registering with its software at the same moment at one point on Monday.

Image from Club Systems

“Prepare for golf, it is happening, courses in Scotland will open and it will be soon, get ready now and avoid the rush,” said managing director Richard Peabody.

“The rush in England caused a massive strain on providers’ web servers as did sending emails at the last minute.”

Peabody offered tips to Scottish clubs to help them prepare:

• Have a Zoom committee meeting as soon as possible and decide how you are going to release bookings when the announcement is made to restart playing.
• Communicate your decisions to the members now. It will help their frustration if they can prepare as well, it might even prompt some of those late subs payments.
• Register with an online booking provider now, and start setting up your tee sheets. Club Systems is giving a no quibble, no small print free system for any club until at least the end of 2020.
• Communicate to the members how the system will work and what apps or web links you need now. Don’t wait, prepare the members.
• In many cases members will need to register with the booking service individually – encourage your members to do that early.

Jamie Abbott, managing director of intelligentgolf, added: “Unsurprisingly, the UK’s golfers have been keen to get back onto the courses, and golf clubs have experienced unprecedented levels of bookings in the last 24 hours.

“In order to cooperate with government guidelines and to ensure social distancing, online booking systems have been swiftly implemented at many golf clubs that have not previously had to use such a system for their members.

Image from Club Systems

“We have experienced a monumental 400 per cent increase in traffic, and have been working around the clock to support our customers so that golf club members can schedule their tee off times in line with government guidelines.”

Warrington Golf Club general manager Neil Coulson-Bence agrees that a tee-booking system has been helpful in the last few days.

“It was probably a little bit easier for ourselves as we have a tee-booking system at Warrington,” he said. “And that was an essential item, so that we could know who was on the golf course, when they were coming, when they were leaving.

“The demand was a worry for a lot of golf clubs. But, because we’ve had the tee-booking system, limited the amount of times a member can play in the week, and been able to spread it out over two tees and have only nine holes, it’s meant that there’s been no bottlenecks, no people hanging around on tees, no large gatherings in the golf club.”

The Golf Business revealed on Sunday night that golf could resume in England on Wednesday, less than 40 minutes after Boris Johnson’s speech finished, and it meant we saw about a quarter of a million page views over the next two hours, which also brought our server down for a few minutes.

Golf can resume in Wales and the Republic of Ireland on Monday, but for people who live near courses in those countries only, and it is not yet known when golf can resume in Scotland and Northern Ireland, but it seems that it will be soon.

BRS GOLF has also written for this website about the importance of setting up a tee-booking system at the moment.