Swedish tech company Sweetspot has been chosen by The R&A, golf's governing body, to provide business systems at Golf It!, its new community-focused golf and entertainment venue. The first facility will open in Glasgow in the summer of 2023 and will, among other things, include a nine-hole course, adventure golf and golf simulators

Swedish Sweetspot is part of a global effort to change golf

Swedish tech company Sweetspot has been chosen by The R&A, golf's governing body, to provide business systems at Golf It!, its new community-focused golf and entertainment venue. The first facility will open in Glasgow in the summer of 2023 and will, among other things, include a nine-hole course, adventure golf and golf simulators. 

With the concept Golf It!, The R&A – which has160 affiliated organisations, including national federations – aims to change the sport fundamentally. The concept's first facility will be located on the banks of Hogganfield Loch in the North East of Glasgow with the purpose of making golf more accessible and inclusive. To achieve their goal, The R&A has carefully selected partners they consider the best in each area. 

Golf It! is a significant investment that will make golf a more inclusive and accessible sport – for everyone. The venue has been specifically designed to attract a new audience to the game. Therefore working with a system that provides a clear understanding of behavior and how people interact with their activities is of paramount importance. This is where the Swedish company, Sweetspot, comes into the picture. The deal between the two parties extends over five years, where Sweetspot will develop and establish business systems on behalf of Golf It!. 

– After a thorough and robust scoping process, the Sweetspot platform was the only system we found to have the capability to achieve our business goals. Our aim is to provide customers with the right product, at the right time and at the right price, which will ultimately make the game more accessible and affordable. With Sweetspot we believe we can achieve this goal, says Russell Smith, General Manager of Golf It! 

Sweetspot will create an overall solution for the whole concept that includes a checkout system where The R&A can follow different types of consumer behavior. The focus will be on revenue management and increasing the accessibility for more golfers by applying dynamic pricing. 

– We are delighted to get the opportunity to work with the largest golf organization in the world. It's a great recognition of our company and product. They share our vision to modernize golf to get more people to experience the sport we love, says Henrik Ahlin, CEO at Sweetspot. 

The R&A is investing £200 million over ten years in developing golf and supports the growth of the sport internationally. 

Sweetspot's business concept is to build a business platform that collects and ensures accurate data on all transactions and in addition delivers insights and functionality that increase golf facilities' revenues with the help of Revenue Management.

Revenue Management means selling the right service, to the right person, at the right price, at the right time optimally packaged. This means that you need to know your customers' perception of the value of a service and optimize your pricing and availability for tee times according to this and offer it to the right customer segment.

In practice, this means that the golf facility's focus is shifted away from working with volume, i.e. more members, more guests or more partners to increase its revenue. Instead focus on which target groups we have, which we want to attract and how we can optimize our revenue towards these customer segments.

Below, Sweetspot presents four different steps a golf facility can take to significantly increase its revenue.

Make sure that greenfee prices are high on attractive tee times

The right pricing at attractive tee times creates financial incentives to pay the annual fee to the facility and creates a large membership value. Members do not have to play many rounds on attractive tee times if the price is high on green fees to justify paying the annual fee. Low prices and discounts on attractive tee times create the opposite effect and drive members away from annual memberships.

Set the right price for less attractive times

High prices at attractive tee times create demand for tee times that have lower prices and are less attractive. Green fee guests will move away from the best times and towards tee times with lower attractiveness to get a reasonable price. This in turn creates great accessibility for the club members to the attractive tee times. At most clubs, members are the most important customer and should be prioritized in terms of accessibility too attractive tee times to increase the value of membership. Filling these tee times with green fee guests reduces the possibility of reaching the number of rounds I want to play and makes it difficult to justify my annual fee and willingness to pay decreases.

Each golf club has a small group, 10 - 15% of members, who are responsible for the largest part of all play at the club (about 50% of the attractive tee times). By limiting the current full membership so it contains a maximum limit of the total number of bookings at the best tee times, you create better accessibility and enable more people to take part of these tee times. This ensures that members who usually don’t get to play as much now remain as full time members since their number of rounds goes up on expensive, attractive tee times. Their willingness to pay remains.

However, the willingness to pay and the demand for golf is the highest among those who play a lot on attractive tee times. By introducing new memberships where you are offered better accessibility than before, more rounds at attractive times, plus a few other benefits, the club can now charge substantially more of this target group. 

Limit the number of simultaneous bookings strictly

By severely limiting the possibility of booking several attractive tee times in advance, you open up for much better accessibility for all members. There is a great demand for more simultaneous bookings and you as a club can also take advantage of this demand and thereby increase your membership income. By diversifying memberships based on how many simultaneous bookings are included, the club can increase its revenue and offer something that some target groups consider important.  Membership with several simultaneous bookings requires a higher price, while the less active member can choose a membership that fits its level of play better with less number of simultaneous bookings included in the offer to perhaps a lower price. 

Are you interested in knowing more about how Sweetspot analyzes your data, serve it in best in class business intelligence dashboards and combine that with uses of strategic revenue management to help golf facilities reach their full potential please contact:

A word with Sweetspot - article in CMAE news magazine

The Club Managers Association of Europe (CMAE) are delighted to announce a new partnership with Swedish based software company Sweetspot

Golf tech frontrunner Sweetspot partner up with CMAE

The Club Managers Association of Europe (CMAE) are delighted to announce a new partnership with Swedish based software company Sweetspot.  

Sweetspot has in recent years revolutionized the golf business in Sweden with its data-driven revenue management platform. Now they partner up with CMAE.

“I have followed their development on the Swedish market and when they now decided to go international, our discussions were great since they enjoy education as much as we do, Torbjörn “Toby” Johansson, Director of Education CMAE commenting. 

“We are excited to become a partner with CMAE and its members. The partnership will serve as the first step towards a more strategic and knowledge-driven context in the European golf market. We want to be an active partner and, together with the experience and knowledge within the CMAE organization, develop the golf facilities in Europe – says Henrik Ahlin, CEO and founder of Sweetspot.

Sweetspots mission is to help golf facilities worldwide reach their full potential. The company was founded in 2016 with operations in Sweden and will expand to the European market during 2022.

For further information please visit https://sweetspot.io or contact Henrik Ahlin henrik@sweetspot.io , Gustav Andersson on gustav@sweetspot.io +46709 653 395

Tel | +44 (0) 2476 692359 | Mob | +44 (0) 7900 604814

News

R&A signs with Sweetspot

A word with Sweetspot - article in CMAE news magazine

Press release CMAE Sweetspot