Fore!mula For Success - Is The Fore!mula For Success - October 2010
Fore!mula For Success Is The Fore!mula For Success
Staying current on your software’s capabilities is important for any golf course looking to maximize their technology investment and improve their business. Learning about a product or feature other courses have successfully implemented can be very beneficial in helping your golf course increase rounds and revenue by trying something new. Fore! Reservations' monthly Fore!mula For Success highlights a particular technology feature and Users who have had success with that feature. Hopefully by sharing these accounts, other golf course operators will follow suit in their system implementation. This month, a new spin is taken on the article, as we highlight golf courses that employed an idea they read about in Fore!mula For Success at their facility.Sycamore Ridge Golf Course, an 18 hole public course in Spring Hill, KS, once utilized third-party tee time resellers to help sell tee times online. After using "barter for resale" and "last-minute" models and seeing less than impressive results, Director of Golf Alex Eichman concluded a different online tee time pricing strategy was in the course’s best interest.
“Terminating our affiliation with third-parties was one of the best decisions I’ve made as an operator,” Alex states. “I realized third-party resellers market to discount-seeking single visit customers that don’t benefit our golf course. I can’t expect to have much success if golfers are playing our course at a discount I don’t control. I would encourage any operator using a third-party to evaluate the revenue benefit versus the cost of losing control of your customers.”
“After hearing Fore! Reservations point of view on this subject and seeing proven results from courses featured in Fore!mula For Success articles that utilize Fore! Internet webpage booking tools; it was clear we needed to make a change to get better results,” continues Alex. “By shifting our strategy to only offering online tee times through our website; nearly 70% of our total rounds are booked online.”
Booking that many rounds online (18,869 in 2009) is a result of Sycamore Ridge’s marketing strategy that consists of one simple message: “Guaranteed Lowest Rates Are Only Found Online At sycamoreridgegolf.com”. “Our best rate is only available on our website,” Alex says. “We emulate the airline and hotel industry with our pricing strategy training our customers that our guaranteed lowest rates can only be found on our website, not a third-party’s. In doing so we’ve taken control of our online pricing and protected our brand!”
Fore!mula For Success articles have also helped ArrowHead Golf Club a semi-private facility in Naples, FL and Stoneybrook Golf Course an 18 hole public course in Columbia, TN with their respective marketing strategies and software implementation.
ArrowHead Golf Operations Administrator Angela Willard launched a Facebook page for the course after reading the Fore!mula For Success article on social media. “We bounced the idea around before the article came out, but after reading Fore!mula For Success we had a better understanding of how Facebook could be beneficial for our golf course and decided to go for it,” says Angela. “The articles are a great resource to extract ideas that help your operation. The light bulb doesn’t always go on by itself. If you don’t read Fore!mula For Success that light bulb may never go on, and you can miss out on an opportunity to learn how to utilize the system to its fullest.”
Since recently becoming Head Golf Professional at Stoneybrook Golf Course, one of Rick Saxby's goals is to increase his facility's software utilization, and finds Fore!mula For Success to be very helpful in doing so. “As far as I could tell we were underutilizing the software," Rick says. "Fore!mula For Success opened my eyes to what it can do and I’m excited to begin implementing many new features this season."
The software feature highlighted in a recent Fore!mula For Success that Rick immediately implemented is the Comeback Coupon. “I wouldn’t have known about the effectiveness of the Comeback Coupon without reading the article,” says Rick. “Learning about it through User success stories gave me the confidence that it could also help our course generate rounds and revenue.”
“Fore!mula For Success is worth its weight in gold,” concludes Alex. “For the short time it takes to read you can intake a wealth of valuable information. Anyone not taking advantage of the knowledge Fore! Reservations shares through User success stories is missing out on a great opportunity to help their business succeed.”
Has your facility recently implemented a new software product or feature that's helped your business? Has Fore! Outing helped you better manage outings and collect more customer information for your database? Are you booking more foursomes with Find-A-Game? Is your tee sheet filling up with Prepaid Specials? If so we'd like to share your success story! Please e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and we'll feature your course in an upcoming article.
