A growing number of golf clubs now have their own App, but the latest one featuring the golf course at Surrey’s Pine Ridge Golf Club can claim to have set a new quality standard.
The App will be the first in the UK to enable both golfers and the club’s management team to use two pieces of new technology: pace-of-play management by GREENi, and 3D course flyovers by Golfgraffix.
The two innovations are integrated in the App, and sit alongside its other comprehensive features which include hole-by-hole images and GPS yardage functionality; vouchers and rewards; real-time scoring; and an events calendar.
The club will also be able to ‘push’ announcements and special offers direct to golfers’ phones via the App, which is compatible with Apple and Android products, including iPhone, iPad and most of the latest tablets.
The App’s creators claim that the new App gives Pine Ridge more tools to improve management efficiency than any other App on the market.
“We’re excited to be the first UK golf club to have an App of this kind” said Nikki Blacker, General Manager at Pine Ridge GC. “We saw GREENi’s pace-of-play management system at first-hand here in autumn 2013, and with the additional visual elements which Golfgraffix provides, along with the many other features, this will be a very attractive and useful App for this club. We are looking forward to pushing it to its full potential, and I’m looking forward to the time-savings and other club management benefits which it will bring. I am sure that our customers will love it too”.
Both GREENi and Golfgraffix are represented in the UK by PLGI, which brought the two firms together to create the App for Pine Ridge GC, which is owned and operated by the UK’s largest group, Crown Golf.
“The golf club manager can choose which parts of the App he or she wants for their club” said PLGI’s Peter Lawrie, European Tour Professional and co-founder of PLGI. “It is completely modular, so we can build functions into it as the club’s needs change and grow”.
“Pine Ridge have chosen to exploit more or less all of the App’s capabilities from Day One,” said PLGI co-founder Stephen Schindler, from GP Sports Management, “but there are Lite versions for clubs also available”.
“We had 600 downloads in the first week” said Marcus Doyle, Sales & Marketing Manager at Castleknock GC, west of Dublin, the first club in Ireland to adopt the App. “We offered a free green fee with every download, and it made a wonderfully fast start.
“I can attribute many actual sales to the App, and it has been very beneficial here at the club. The ‘push’ feature enables me to send offers out to members and customers, and I see the revenue coming directly back. It is much more trackable than a conventional advertising campaign, where you often can’t evaluate the benefit.
“’Push’ is a great way to keep in touch with people. Not only do we send them offers, rewards and notifications about the tee sheet, but we can also geo-target advertising based on where they are, which brings in more revenue.
“The Golfgraffix 3D graphics are amazing, and the GREENi feature has enabled us to improve our course management – we now wait the full 10 minutes between sending groups out, for example, and we have knocked 10-15 minutes off our average round time. GREENi also enables us to do dynamic pricing, as we can sell full rounds of golf later in the day by showing the exact average round time that afternoon, which is incredibly useful.”
Golf clubs who are interested in having the App at their own club can contact Steve Schindler on +44 (0)7799 883000, or by emailing sjs@gpsportsmanagement.com