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Market Summary – Golf & Club Management Software

Market Overview

Software designed to facilitate golf course operations continues to increase in scope and capabilities, whether for Country Clubs, Golf Courses, Golf Management Companies, or Hotels. The various systems cover everything from tee sheets to online tee times but go beyond scheduling foursomes. Today’s systems are significantly more intelligent at understanding and communicating with members, golfers, and customers.

Capsolve identified 51 companies that provide various products in the Club Management Systems category. The category gives buyers multiple solution paths when considering how these software products may be implemented or combined for an eventual solution path.

The companies selling these solutions are located across the globe, with 44% of them in the United States.

Marketplace Context

A handful of large software companies are part of this category of solution providers, with many others being smaller companies with significantly varying functionality combinations. The core feature set usually includes a Point of Sale designed with a tee sheet. However, the additional features often go well beyond this to create member management, golf-specific features, additional activity scheduling, banquets, catering, pro shop POS, F&B POS, online tee-time functionality, and sometimes into various website, distribution, and marketing capabilities.

Most companies have existed for more than five years, with much of the digital innovation, such as online tee times, websites, and digital marketing, occurring during the most recent 20 years. The characteristics of the golf industry have dampened the innovation that continues in many other software-enabled industries. If the industry benefits from continued generational retirement waves, this may increase the number of new entrants wanting to develop software for its businesses and encourage more investment from existing companies.

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Solution Paths

Changing your Golf Management System can feel like a rather complicated decision. However, the key element is deciding what solution you want to select as your new core element of technology. While it is not required to take this approach, the most common path is to choose a Golf or Club system that will support your most important strategic and tactical technology capabilities and then decide what new or existing technology should complement it. A few standard approaches enabled by today’s technology solutions within this category include:

• Comprehensive Core: a solution with multiple modules designed to provide a fully integrated approach to covering most or all property needs
• Best Fit Core: a solution with multiple modules covering the minimum requirements in combination with important strategic capabilities
• Minimized Core: a solution typically covering the most crucial strategic and operational needs but providing significant flexibility to connect to other best-of-breed solutions to complement the core
• Best Strategic Fit: a solution providing a balance between comprehensiveness and long-term strategic needs

These solution paths are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Solutions within the marketplace may create the opportunity to combine one or more paths and meet more of your selection criteria. Appropriately formulating an RFP to share with potential vendors will help to ensure you ask the best questions specific to your business while allowing you to learn about the depth of each potential vendor partner.

Pricing Information

Numerous pricing models exist in the marketplace, and it is crucial to understand how each one will affect your total cost of ownership. The standard pricing structures are:

• Base Software Price plus a Maintenance Charge: This pricing is usually charged for on-premise software installed on local servers. It is generally charged based on the number of servers, user licenses, or user accounts. There is an ongoing charge for modifications and upgrades based on the percentage of the base software.
• Subscription Price: This pricing is more common today with the adoption of Software-as-a-Service. The price is often charged annually, quarterly, or monthly and is applied to each company or user account.

As you might expect, a combination of these pricing approaches may be applied to any given software.

Sales & Marketing Considerations

Websites, Online Tee Times, 3rd Party Tee Time Distribution, and Membership Marketing, in addition to traditional marketing and advertising methods, are the fundamentals of building a customer base, whether for a public, private, or semi-private course. Each area has a wealth of features and functionality to consider when purchasing a new system infrastructure or replacing selected portions of an existing one. While it is easy to put a potential solution in place, understanding the details and addressing them as part of your implementation or configuration adjustments may be the difference in achieving success for a given marketing program or sales initiative.

A website is a perfect example. A quality planning effort will allow you to assemble a visually appealing site, especially if you have help from an agency or qualified designer to create much of the branding and visual elements. The next step is to make sure the copy is positioned well for your messaging and search engine optimization. SEO will bring people to your site once it is launched. While not the only remaining consideration, the technological aspects of managing the content within a CMS and everything it takes to reliably put it in front of your audience online are far from trivial.

Deciding on distribution partners is another example. First, you must decide if the 3rd party sites that sell tee times are appropriate partners. Second, determine your positioning and pricing on each. Will this be the same across all channels, or are selected sites unique and need a customized approach? Third, managing inventory, pricing, and reserved tee times across all sites and channels should be streamlined.

Connecting the various systems to coordinate this is not simple, but it is often handled for you. If all the capabilities reside in one system, getting them to share the appropriate data is straightforward as long as they have the needed module. However, it may take more than one system. For example, the website can be interfaced with the online tee time engine and then this engine with the tee sheet. And then, bringing the tee time reservations that originated in other systems into the tee sheet closes the loop. Designing how this works for one or more locations will dramatically influence the effectiveness and efficiency of your programs and lead us to interconnectivity.

Current Trends

1. Continued waves of retirees and other consumer influences will create new golfers seeking to experience the game at golf courses and country clubs.
2. 3rd Party Tee Times: Golf Courses continue to distribute across an increasing array of partner sites, increasing the complexity of online distribution unless automation supports these developing marketing opportunities.
3. Online Ordering: Most restaurants, including those affiliated with golf courses, now have Digital Ordering Solutions as standard technology, along with the required connectivity to these systems.
4. Increased Changes in Menu: The marketplace has decreased the stability of menus for now. This is caused by the need to provide food through delivery and takeout scenarios, addressing changing demand levels, competition, and other market dynamics.
5. Partner Ecosystem Race: Vendors’ having a mature set of functionality bolstered in part by partnerships pre-integrated into their solution is becoming increasingly important for leading solutions in the marketplace.
6. Safety Protocols: Clubs, Golf Courses, and Restaurants faced an onslaught of protocol changes while educating guests and training employees to comply.

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About this Report

This document reviews the marketing information and capabilities of this category’s solutions and the surrounding technology ecosystem. It contains original content written by Capsolve to provide a perspective of current trends affecting one or more hotel, restaurant, golf, and country club industries. The analysis covers a statistically significant portion of the previously defined category marketplace.