The Club Company and The Revenue Club make hay, without the sunshine

The UK’s largest multi-course operator, The Club Company approached The Revenue Club in autumn 2023 to assess where additional gains could be made with their casual visitor revenue. The majority of the venues are health and country clubs with onsite health clubs, and there is a significant focus on maintaining a strong membership base. Their online visitor revenue had reduced over the preceding twelve months which illustrated the opportunity to increase visitor revenue with a new approach with The Revenue Club.

Having carried out an initial trial month at Meyrick Park in Dorset, and Wharton Park in Worcestershire, it quickly became apparent that the implementation of a new visitor strategy had the potential to grow their visitor income without impacting the membership experience or alter the existing operations. The trial highlighted three key areas that would help the group take advantage of demand from their target market:

• Implementation of a dynamic pricing structure with ongoing revenue management of the tee sheet.
• Regular and consistent visitor focused digital marketing via their own email and social media channels.
• Benchmarking reports to illustrate how their sales and KPIs compared to the overall UK market, which highlighted the areas for potential growth and subsequent performance.

Over the course of the winter period, the new strategy was implemented at a further thirteen venues in the group with dedicated account management support to the individual venues and senior team to ensure a seamless introduction of the new approach. Additionally, having identified a deficiency in the level of the visitor databases, a data collection exercise was carried out via social media that increased the number of marketing contacts by 40% to allow subsequent marketing communications to create a much greater impact.

The historic green fee pricing approach had been very linear. In most cases a straightforward morning and afternoon price led to a low level of course utilisation in the period preceding the change from peak to off peak rates. There was also very high course usage in the two hours following the price drop which created capacity issues and a slower rounds at these busy times. A more granular approach with a tiered rate structure smoothed out the footfall on the course and made better use of the existing capacity, which led to an increase in the average green fee as golfers were less likely to wait until for the off-peak times to play.

Extra incentives were introduced for golfers to book online in order to create greater efficiencies for the onsite staff through the reduction of phone calls, and improved data collection from a more effective use of Intelligent Golf, their tee sheet provider.

In what turned out to be one of the wettest winters on record, green fee sales grew by 32% across the group in the space of six months. This was achieved alongside a £4 rise in the average green fee across the group, and a £8 uplift in the average sale price which has generated a higher yield per tee time.

As a result of the increase in marketing activity, web traffic has grown by 43% in the period, despite a perceived drop in demand owing to the challenging conditions. Overall The Club Company is tracking towards annual growth in the visitor revenue of 35% with plenty of potential to increase this figure.

Regional Operations Director at The Club Company, Matt Rollinson was instrumental in initiating the link up with The Revenue Club.

“The initial results that have been achieved by The Revenue Club in such a short space of time are very pleasing, particularly against a backdrop of relentless rain over the last few months.”

“The work they have carried out has highlighted further areas of opportunity for us to exploit and continue to develop our visitor business at our growing collection of UK venues. It has been enjoyable working with the team at The Revenue Club and their professional approach to this important part of our business has proven to be a vital element of our 2024 strategy, and hopefully beyond.”