Independent Golfer Ireland

Exactly. The exact type of people clubs are begging to play their course and yet if it’s an iGolf member all of a sudden they actually want to price them out?!

I dont think anyone is 'begging' Ballybunion or Old Head or Portmarnock members to play at their course. And agreed, the fact those clubs dont do opens doesnt sit right with a lot of people including me. Not that this would be a big piece of the pie anyway. If they did opens it'd be like one or two days per year and you'd still be paying €150 - €200 or so.

Anyhow, how is charging regular fee to iGolfers but allowing them into comp - for example - pricing them out?

If that’s the case that’s fine but still don’t see why tbh.

Are they just the same for green fees or is it an open day rate?

Good. None of some of the nonsense spouted that I’ve read here to be seen yet anyway.

Cheers, thanks

Can I ask a question?

Is it that people feel that a person joining this scheme should have to pay more to play in an open competition than a person who is a member of another club?

Take Bunclody for example. They have an open every Wednesday. It's €10 for a member to play in that competition. A member from Wexford can play for €40 and then people feel an iGolfer should pay €50/€60 to play in the same competition?

I also saw someone mention that the iGolfer isn't contributing as much to the club but what if that iGolfer spent his €40 for his round, his €10 for coffee, bar and drink for the round and then another €25 in the bar afterwards? If you say sorry iGolfer your open fee is €60 and he decides not to play because he feels the value isn't quite there you are losing out as a club on his money that day and potentially on a repeat green fee.

Again with my example of Bunclody a member who plays once a week will contribute €23.50 (€1200/52) + €10 competition fee. The iGolfer will have paid €40 so the club is up money comparing the two before any other spend.

To me it would also seem foolish to turn away an iGolfer if you have available slots on the timesheet. You are just underutilizing your facility.

It's a bit of a flawed argument saying an igolfer is worth more than a member, because youre calculating a comp fee for a single open.

Your member is contributing that €23.50 every week, irrespective of the individual open.

I think clubs are saying...I don't want to create an incentive for people to leave their membership and start playing opens instead.

Because their 23.50 per week is gone. If the iGolfer plays 1 open for 40, the member has more than covered that, in the space of 2 weeks, by just being a member.

I'm in a well subscribed club, so this won't impact my place at all. It'll be a negligible impact financially if a couple of guys leave, we could likely absorb it.

I just don't like the principle and attitude of it. Just has the feel of wanting the best of all worlds.

If you want to compromise by not being a member of a club, then accept the compromise of taking a hit on the other side

I'm not saying the iGolfer is worth more than the member. I'm saying as an example if you have one member who plays every midweek competition in Bunclody his contribution to the cloud is €1200 + €520. If one iGolfer played every Wednesday they'd be worth €2080 to the club.

Also from my experience working in a clubhouse bar/restaurant in the past you would be far more likely to get a visitor to buy a bar and drink before playing and food after a round compared to a lot of "carpark" members.

And just to add to my thought process on the under utilisation of a course and seizing on an opportunity from iGolfer.

If it was me and assuming my club had the data I would review every midweek open (Monday - Friday, excluding seniors, juniors etc) going back 10 years or more if the data is easily available. I would look to get the total slots available, total slots booked by members, total slots booked by visitors and slots not used. I would exclude the COVID period as this would be an outlier period.

I would then average all the data and come up with our targets for the next 12 months. If the data said that 60% of times were booked by members then I'd allocate that ratio to every open timesheet, if visitors accounted for 25% then I'd allocate that ratio and I'd leave 5% spare to free up for members subject to demand. The remaining 10% would be my target to promote for iGolfers at the clubs standard open rate.

In addition to this I would set up a marketing initiative for iGolfers whereby if they play in a certain number of open competitions in a calender year (say 5) we as a club then get in touch with that iGolfer and ask what are we doing right that keeps bringing them back. I would also look to incentives these iGolfers to join for the coming year. Maybe your open competition/green fees for 2025 are then given as a discount against your next three years subscriptions with the club (€300 in open fees in 2025, join club in 2026 and given €100 discount in 2026, 2027 and 2028). This to me would hopefully see a nice steady increase in membership where we take the low hanging fruit of repeat iGolfers.

There's no flaw in what I said, you've just misunderstood.

I'm not saying that the same iGolfer will play Bunclody every Wednesday but rather it only takes one iGolfer to play each week to add an additional €300+ to the clubs Income over a single member.

If you have 25 iGolfers playing in your open that's about .75 to 1 hour of your timesheet each open. I'd be surprised if most clubs didn't have that availability in a normal midweek open outside of open week. Those 25 iGolfers could add approximately €7.5K in extra Income in the year that the club may not have had and that's before any additional spend. €7.5K may not be a lot extra but that'd pay 3 months electricity or a whole new set of range balls etc that a club doesn't need to find from somewhere else.

It's also not really about that additional €300 a year though, it's about using the iGolfer system to identify potential new members and then actively target those repeat iGolfers and incentive them to join your club.

You'll always have a certain number of new members every year who join because a friend or relative is a member but it is really difficult to attract new members outside of these. IGolfer will now give clubs a new data source to actively target potential new members.