‘August was third best performing month EVER’
By Alistair Dunsmuir
A business growth agency is reporting that its golf club clients experienced their third best month ever for green fee income in August 2024.
The Revenue Club says its 200 golf clubs in the UK and Ireland averaged over £25,000 of visitor income for the month.
The top two months on record are June 2020 and July 2020, when the industry experienced an unprecedented participation boom following Covid lockdowns.
Casual green fee revenue grew by 17 percent from July to August to a total of £25,697 at the average golf club that operates with the company.
The £6.7 million in visitor revenue showed an increase of 28 percent on last August, and demand for tee times was the highest it has been in over four years.
“It is incredibly exciting to see this level of growth in the industry with golf clubs enjoying levels of visitor demand that we’ve not witnessed in over four years,” said Rob Corcoran, director at The Revenue Club. “It illustrates the importance of visitor green fees as a vital ingredient of the business mix, and the potential that can be achieved with focussed marketing and dynamic pricing structures.”
He added that some of the uplift can be attributed to a rise in prices and some to a jump in online traffic to golf club course booking engines. The average club saw 1,974 people using an online booking engine in August, the highest since summer 2020. A little over two-thirds of all visitor revenue came from online bookings, with the remainder from phone and walk-in bookings. All three forms of bookings saw year-on-year growth in August.
By Alistair Dunsmuir
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How can golf clubs turn these green fee payers into members??
We’ve found that a lot of the clubs we work with are successful at converting visitors to members by keeping close to them with regular communication, and employing more advanced CRM activity. They are almost treated like partial members rather than being kept at arms length so they feel like part of the club already, and it is the first place they come to when they are in a position to join.
In this respect, focusing on marketing to visitors is probably the best way to recruit new members as it gets golfers to the course, allowing you to showcase your product to a key target market.