When I hear about an interesting golf business news and a golf club enhancement/development project I like to analyze them from two main aspects:
- Its contribution to the overall customer experience of the golf club;
- How it can help to generate extra value.
Here is the latest Vale Resort news. The Vale Resort in South Wales purchased 50 Club Car golf carts with the Visage navigation system. After more than 4 years, I don’t have to introduce the benefits fo the GPS-based Visage navigation system.
The Las Colinas Golf & Country Club was the first golf club in Europe to introduce the Visage navigation system in 2014.
Clive Coombs, the Vale Resort’s golf manager said: “Last year we invested £400,000 in our greens maintenance equipment to ensure our golf courses are presented to the highest standards and we have also just completed a £500,000 bedroom refurbishment across the hotel.” The hotel has got 143 rooms.
The personalized right-time experience & the Vale Resort
The development of the Visage navigation is a great example of how digital solutions are integrating into physical products. This also explains how the technology became affordable.
As a result of this, our guests’ expectations are growing to receive personalized experiences anytime, anywhere. They expect many of the benefits they can already have today will evolve.
Just give you one of the latest innovations in Club Car: the Shark Experience. It is an interesting attempt to provide entertainment (music, live sports, entertainment, news, and golf tips) for guests.
I think an AR (augmented reality) solution to show the golf course in 3D would be a much more relevant service in the right-time. Check out PGA Tour’s AR service.
Club Car’s Visage mobile golf information system can already handle F&B, pro-shop related and other requests from golfers.
At the very same time, every club manager should ask these questions, from himself and from his team:
- What does experience mean?
- What do customers actually experience?
- What do we want them to experience?
I can strongly recommend before you invest in anything to understand the meaning of ‘experience’. We should feel the moments first, and then design the experience around them. Otherwise, you will not be able to come up with a unique & relevant experience.
What is sure that speed and simplicity are indispensable to impress guests and customers. The simplicity of the service will help to impress elder generation members.
When we are talking about experiences we should not forget that they are holistic, personal (=not objective!!) and situational.
To be able to drive better engagement and personalization we should invest in business intelligence.
This is why I recommended in my presentation at the 4th National Conference on Residential Tourism & Golf (11th April 2018; Estoril, Portugal) to create the analytics expert position.