Design your course to be the most challenging in the area and your clientele will be made up of professional golfers looking for a challenge. Use a more approachable golf course design and your course will be more accessible to families and beginners.
If you think about it, there are a lot of variables that affect the types of customers your club will attract. Location, amenities, course design, quality of maintenance, and the appearance of the facility and restaurant japan whatsapp number all place your business in a specific segment of the market.
As a business owner, it is essential to understand your place in the market. Sometimes it takes the willingness to accept building a simple, family-friendly course to differentiate yourself from your competitors. The main takeaway here is that your golf course design is the number one thing that differentiates you from your competitors .
Bayonne Golf Club identifies its target market
Sometimes it makes sense to design and build a challenging, high-end course. Let’s take a look at Bayonne Golf Club, which is located about 4 miles from downtown Manhattan. From the very beginning of the design, the goal for the course was to attract elite players to a quality course that is closer to downtown New York than any other golf course.
The course required a massive investment of approximately $130 million to build. The course, which was built on a former garbage dump, now welcomes players by boat directly from downtown Manhattan to enjoy the course along the Hudson River, with panoramic views of New York City.
What Bayonne Golf Club does so well is clearly know its place in the market and therefore the customers it serves. Because of this, the club has been able to focus all of its energy on targeting and attracting a specific demographic. The high level of service they provide and their positioning in the immediate golf market gives the club the right to charge its members an initiation fee that amounts to $100,000.
Northlands Municipal Golf Course Finds Its Market
There are not only high-end golf clubs, you can also position your golf course in a more family-oriented segment.
Consider the example of Northlands Municipal Golf Course in North Vancouver, British Columbia. In 2009, the course acknowledged that it was having difficulty attracting younger players, beginners and families. As a municipal course, the operation was well positioned to attract these demographics, but it wasn’t.
It was then that the club's management realized that the main problem in reaching these individuals was the difficulty of the course. The course had been built by a renowned golf course architect and featured complex features that were far too difficult for the average player.
To make matters worse, the course had significant drainage problems and trees and other vegetation were hampering playability. Steve Haggard, who was the club's manager at the time, recognised the problem and decided that something had to be done.
Under Steve Haggard, the course has reduced the difficulty of bunkers and pruned the surrounding areas of the tracks. The course has also committed to beginning annual investments to address its drainage issues and has gotten rid of fescue to make stray balls easier to find.
Did these actions produce results? The answer is obvious, more playability means more bookings and more revenue. In fact, people enjoyed playing the course more because it was not as difficult as it used to be. Mistakes were much less costly so beginners and families could enjoy their playing time. They had found the perfect balance.