While almost every golf club in Britain publishes what a visitor pays to play for a green fee, almost none publish what a member’s guest pays, even though it is a different and usually far lower figure set by the same club for the same round.
The Member’s Guest Rate Index, a continuing project to collect that second number club by club, now covers 256 clubs, of which 255 can be compared directly against a confirmed visitor fee.
The typical member’s guest rate at a British golf club is about £35, against a typical visitor green fee of about £95 at the same clubs.
Half of the clubs in the index charge between £25 and £39 to sign in a guest, regardless of the course, while the visitor fee at those same clubs ranges from £35 to more than £300. A club’s guest rate, the index suggests, says very little about the quality of its course and a great deal about what its committee considers fair to charge a member’s friend.
The gap is widest at the best courses. At clubs ranked in Britain’s top 100, the median guest rate is £45 against a median visitor fee of £222.50 – a difference of £182.50.
Regionally, an introduction is worth most in Scotland, where the median saving is £125 a round, and least in the north east, at £30. At its widest, the gap between the two prices runs to £350 a round, with the clubs showing the largest differences ranked within the index itself.
Alex Greenwood, founder of Hosted Rounds, which compiled the index, said the project grew out of his own experience trying to play sought-after courses: “I wanted to play the courses everyone wants to play, and I kept coming back to the same answer. The way on is to know a member. Not a booking site, not a deal, a person. Once you notice that, you start wondering how many golfers are one introduction away from a course they have wanted to play for twenty years, and have no idea it would cost them forty quid.”
He argues the value of a guest rate extends beyond price: “The rate in this index is not one you can go and book. It only exists when a member signs you in, and that is the whole point of it. And when they do, you are not just getting the price. You are getting somebody who knows where not to go on the third, who tells you the greens run away from the hill, and who introduces you in the clubhouse afterwards. Cheaper golf, better golf and one more person you know in the game.”
On why the gap is widest at the top end of British golf, Greenwood said: “The courses at the top of the British game are not really pricing for British golfers any more. They are pricing for somebody flying in, and more and more that is an American with a bucket list and a feed full of golf content telling them where to go. On the north west coast especially, visitor fees have gone somewhere no ordinary club golfer recognises. What has not moved is the guest rate. That is why the gap is widest exactly where you would most want it to be, and why knowing a member has quietly become the only affordable way onto the best courses in the country.”
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