What Third-Party Customers Mean for Your Golf Course

I spend a lot of my days trying to figure out how to help golf courses run without tee time trades. As the CTO of foreUP, I’m committed to ensuring that courses have the option to operate without them, but there’s one problem: third-party resellers are capable of sending a lot of golfers to your course.

However, it comes at a huge cost, including cheapened green fees, additional maintenance, and a worse experience for full-paying members. And while selling tee times may increase occupancy, revenue and profit are far more important metrics for your course.

I’ve spoken with many courses who removed their tee times completely from third party websites, and while the number of rounds dropped significantly, they’ve seen revenue increase by up to 30%.

Our key objective at foreUP is to help you grow your club and to become more profitable. In this piece, I’ll speak to how I’ve seen clubs use third-party aggregators in an effective and revenue-producing manner.

The problem with third-party customers

Third party sites view your club as their product; they have no reason to do what’s in your best interest. They sell YOUR business to THEIR own customer base. Without the right tools, a course can become dependent on that relationship, even though it’s hurting them.

For this reason, when a third-party customer enters your property your goal must be to convert them into your own recurring customer. By breaking the dependency on third party sites you’ll lower your costs and increase your revenue.

That being said, what should your goal be with regards to customers from third-party sites?

Goal: Get them to book on your site, and not on the third-party provider’s.

What effect will it have?

The probability of selling a product to a third party customer is between 5%-20%. The probability of selling to an existing customer, however, is nearly 70%.

Converting only 2% of third party customers to book on your website is equivalent to cutting costs by 10%.

Read the White Paper

I’ve created this white paper to help courses identify ways they can maximize on third-party tee time reservations to drive revenue, without losing the value they need to provide to their guests. I hope you find it helpful!

You can read Brendon’s white paper HERE. It’s a quick read, free to download, and full of valuable insight. Enjoy!