A word with Sweetspot - article in CMAE news magazine

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.

1. Charge for the accessibility you create

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. 

1. 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:

Per Svensson Gustav Andersson