In what has been an unprecedented week for the UK golf industry, online visitor golf specialists, The Revenue Club have been working alongside their 140 partner clubs to get thousands of tee times back on sale. Following the recent lifting of restrictions, golf courses have opened to visitors with only a short window to prepare.
The new guidelines have required a reconfiguration of most tee sheets, and many clubs were keen to give members priority on the course. This has required the introduction of various restrictions to ensure the online process aligns with golf clubs’ new arrangements.
“We have seen huge volumes of green fee sales within hours of reopening – golf clubs are achieving their biggest month of online revenue in less than a day,” said Chris Knight, Director at The Revenue Club.
“We have worked closely with our venues to ensure they are the first to market and the digital communications we’ve sent have had an instant impact with thousands of pounds of green fee revenue being booked within minutes in some cases.
“The safeguarding of golfers and staff is paramount as courses reopen. Balancing this with a desire to capitalise on the significant demand after months of lost revenue has been a key objective. It has been great to see the enormous spike in web traffic we were anticipating on our partner clubs’ websites, and to be able to influence this with our digital marketing activity underlines the importance of our service at a time like this.”
The company, which combines their specialism of online tee time sales with digital marketing, has been communicating with thousands of golfers across the UK on behalf of their clubs to ensure they have maximum visibility online. Email and social media campaigns were prepared ahead of reopening so that golf courses were on sale in a matter of hours with the new guidelines clearly communicated.
The recommendation in the ‘Play Safe, Stay Safe’ guidelines from England Golf that, ‘tee time booking should be done online if at all possible’, has increased the focus on internet bookings for golf clubs. As a result, there are many venues that have set up online bookings for members and visitors for the first time which is likely to accelerate the shift to this method of booking across the industry.
“The crisis surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic continues to present huge challenges to the industry, but it is fantastic to help our partner clubs turn a difficult situation into a success within the current limitations,” Knight concluded. “Hopefully the UK will be in a position to move to the next phase of more relaxed restrictions in the not too distant future and, as with many industries, golf will have evolved considerably in a very short space of time and be far stronger in the future.”
