With summer secondary spend now peaking at over £900 per member and climbing year on year, the clubs that plan their F&B operation around the season’s big sporting moments are the ones that turn temporary excitement into lasting revenue. Vanessa Machin, Sports and Leisure Managing Director of ClearCourse, explains how.
The arrival of summer brings refreshed energy to the UK golf and leisure industry. The Open and Solheim Cup bring a highly anticipated wave of engagement from prospective, existing and previous players to golf, while major sporting moments like Wimbledon and the World Cup are important calendar fixtures for fans. For golf clubs, this seasonal momentum offers a brilliant window to drive meaningful gains in secondary spend revenue.
Recent seasons highlight just how powerful this period can be. As many golf clubs know, secondary spend typically follows a u-shaped annual cycle. It will drop through autumn and winter (averaging around £330 per member), but surge dramatically as the weather warms, peaking between May and August at anywhere between £700 to £900 (average per month) per member.
Interestingly, this peak is growing every year. Summer 2025 beat summer 2024, and the latest figures for May 2026 reached a significant £914 per member – a 14 percent increase compared to the same month last year. Bank holidays and earlier warm weather are key factors for clubs to keep an eye on when it comes to opportunities for maximising secondary spend.
The big question for clubs is how to capture this rising tide of increasing and earlier summer spend, and food and beverage (F&B) is often the secret weapon.
Club managers are already experts in agronomy, greenkeeping and tee-sheet yields. Managing a hospitality venue within the club alongside that can understandably feel like an unpredictable, sometimes low-margin puzzle that distracts from their core purpose. Yet, when the summer calendar heats up, the clubhouse can naturally become the ultimate hub for members and guests to gather and connect over food and drink. Major sporting events like The Open, the World Cup and Wimbledon are a great opportunity to position the clubhouse as the beating heart of the club’s social experience, and F&B becomes a central part of that.
The challenge, of course, is that big tournaments and sporting moments bring sudden, sharp spikes in demand, leaving operational challenges for clubs to overcome. Nothing dampens a great social atmosphere faster than long bar queues and a strained front-of-house team. When a wave of members walks into the clubhouse after a round, or in between Wimbledon tennis matches, traditional operations can get stretched thin.
The clubs that handle these spikes best tend not to improvise.
They plan their summer calendar well in advance, briefing kitchen and bar teams on the key dates that will drive footfall. A simple internal calendar that maps The Open, Wimbledon, and any local club events against predicted covers and staffing levels can make the difference between a profitable afternoon and a chaotic one. Small, structured offers help too: a post-round drinks package, a match-day menu tied to Open coverage or a pre-bookable afternoon tea during Wimbledon finals week. These are not complicated ideas, but they require someone to plan them, and the right operational tools can support this. Table booking software and integrated ordering systems give those staff the room to focus on the member experience rather than managing queues at the till.
The summer of sport is here. The clubs that do the groundwork on planning, staffing and operations will find the commercial upside follows. The members and guests who have a good experience at the bar after The Open will be back. The ones who went to the club for a specific event, like Wimbledon afternoon tea, will talk about it. There is still time to get ahead of the busiest weeks of the season. The clubs that act now rather than react later are the ones that see it in their numbers come September. By backing your hospitality teams during the busiest moments of the year with smooth, seamless back-end operations this summer, you can transform the excitement of temporary summer sporting events into long-term commercial success.
ClearCourse brands include intelligentgolf, a premier golf club management software providing solutions for tee bookings, membership administration, WHS handicapping and tournament management, and Club Systems International, one of the golf industry’s leading providers of sports management and membership software for golf clubs
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