The Modern Tee Time Booking Engine
This article begins a series on tee time booking engines, where we’ll cover how the modern golf course operator can make small but impactful changes to their online experience to generate big revenue gains.
Like it or not, your golf course is (at least in part) an ecommerce business. Online bookings now dominate your tee sheet revenue. Your tee time booking engine is the heart of your ecommerce business. If you have a great booking engine, you can convert customers at a very high rate, keep more margin for yourself, and retarget those customers with the goal of turning them into lifelong, loyal customers.
How good is your booking engine?
The golf industry is well behind its hospitality peers when it comes to delivering amazing booking experiences online. Go search for a rental home on Airbnb, or book a flight on Expedia, or grab a dinner reservation on OpenTable. Here, you’ll see outstanding examples of what it looks like to have a simple yet engaging user experience, refined over time, and purpose-built to optimize conversion. Simply by landing on these sites, you’re exposed to the best of their inventory, and you are invited to book now. And the sites are rich with information that gives the customer confidence in their decision.
Now go book a tee time. See the difference? How many clicks did you make before you could get a glimpse of available inventory? Did you land on a page with no available inventory, or perhaps with low quality inventory? How many customers would leave your site without making a booking? When you serve high-intent customers with outdated ecommerce tools, you waste good traffic and miss out on revenue.
The impression your golf course is leaving on its customers can (and should) be better. There are a few things we at Milled think your tee time booking engine should do to optimize conversion; we’ll cover each in a future post, but here are some basic things you should implement now if you can:
Showcase your best inventory
It often takes 4-8 clicks for a customer to get their first glimpse of available inventory from your home page. Most booking engines ask a golfer to specify a date, time, number of golfers, public or member, and number of holes before the course will reveal which tee times are available. And there’s no guarantee they’ll find inventory they like on that day. Then, that same golfer is asked to repeat that process to find a tee time on a different day. How many of your customers would get annoyed or bored with this process, leave your site, and won’t come back for another month?
Match demand with supply
Because most courses allow for free cancellation, tee time inventory often cycles between being unavailable and available. You can’t expect your customers to be online all the time tracking these cycles. When supply doesn’t match demand, that’s lost revenue. Give your customers the opportunity to step away from your site, and hear from you when the inventory they want is free to book.
Let customers pay to relieve their pain.
What frustrates golfers most about booking online is failing to find quality inventory, either because the inventory they want hasn’t been released yet, or the best inventory has been booked. The best time to offer a solution to this pain at the time your customer feels the pain. When quality inventory is low, your booking engine should be equipped to cross sell membership or bulk-discount program that gives early booking privileges.
Leverage loyalty
Direct bookings and loyal customers build a virtuous revenue cycle. But how are you selling your loyalty programs? Are you discounting tee times to build loyalty? Are loyalty programs in a separate point-of-sale, or not online at all? What could your course occupancy look like if you had more loyal customers than last month? Last year?
It’s time golf courses were afforded a modern hospitality booking engine, one that grows direct revenue and makes the best use of your direct traffic and loyal customers.
Next up, we’ll cover how to showcase your best inventory to increase conversion and grow revenue.