Golf courses face 4 primary challenges with traditional course management systems:
The barter system is the exchange of a golf course’s tee-times as “payment” to a software vendor for the use of their course management system or to a 3rd party distributors for them to post the course’s tee-times online. The vendor or distributors then sells those tee times on its own, often discounting ticket prices by more than 50%, which devalues the golf course’s inventory and ends up costing golf courses revenue and customers.
The bartered tee-times are typically the first to sell out because the vendors dramatically mark the prices down. For example: a typical tee-times for a course may be $40, but the distributors sells the bartered tee-time for $15. As a golfer, if you see a tee-time at 8:10am for $15 but you had booked a tee-time at 8:20am for $40, you would naturally want the same price as the person that paid $15. This causes complications between the golf courses and their customers, and unfortunately the golf courses have no control over the price of the bartered tee-times sold.
In addition, the barter system is extremely expensive for the golf courses. For example, a company may charge a golf course anywhere between one to four tee-times per day. Each tee-time has four rounds at ~$30/round totalling $120. This is potential lost revenue for the course for a single tee-time on a single day. Imagine multiple bartered tee-times per day and the lost revenue in a single month or year.
Yet the industry leading course management system companies have no incentive to change their current lucrative pricing model.
Until now.
Golfsmash is putting pressure on these companies with our innovative pricing model which is much more beneficial for golf courses. We charge a simple licensing fee and a percentage of online tee-time booking sales, thus creating visibility and bringing fairness to the process.
The bartering problem has gotten so bad, that Golfsmash isn’t the only group looking to fix it. The PGA and National Golf Course Owners Association (NGCOA) have collaborated to form the Tee Time Coalitionwhich will serve as an industry monitor for compliance of 3rd party online tee time providers.
The Tee Time Coalition mission is to “support a competitive and balanced marketplace in public golf that is both supportive of the golf course owner, operator, PGA professional and the golf consumer. This will be accomplished by promoting adoption of online tee time guidelines and best practices for technology companies, online agents, marketers, golf course operators, general consumers, and the media.” Golfsmash is the ONLY course management software company to sign the NGCOA best practice guidelines for online tee-time distribution!
Just as online tee time bookings are reaching record highs, and industry regulatory bodies are being formed to do away with the contentious bartering system, Golfsmash is steadily becoming the preferred course management solution for online tee-time bookings, and soon, a thriving social community of golfers and courses as well.