One of the benefits of my long-standing reputation as the “industry contrarian” is that a wide swath of industry participants sends me articles and information weekly that they believe stretch credulity and ask my opinion. While 90%+ of them are issues that are either misconstrued or just not a big enough to warrant much attention, occasionally there are topics that just get curiouser and curiouser as I investigate them and turn out to be worthy of our clients’ and subscribers’ attention.
Such was the case with a forward I received late last season (but sat in my “look into this” file since September) a reference to a Golf Magazine page with the headline: Now on the tee…you! Book your tee times at GOLF.com.” Beneath the simulated screen image of the landing page of their GOLF.com tee times function, there was titillating copy about their newest addition to their “ever-growing list of goodies” offered at GOLF.com. Seeing it billed as “the Expedia of tee-time booking sites,” my curiosity was piqued to see how they had managed to interface with “every major golf booker (including GolfNow and TeeOff.com)” and keep all the prices and discounts straight and current. In a nutshell, they haven’t. In this issue I’ll take you through the hits, misses, inconsistencies and omissions I found just sampling a few courses in the NW Chicago suburbs and how far they have to go to come close to supporting their Expedia-like claim:
• Consolidating 3rd party booking/discount sites isn’t a bad idea, other industries like travel have pulled it off but it’s challenging (think Kayak, Trivago etc.)
• What good is a comparative site if it doesn’t show the direct price from the provider and accurate accounting of discounts?
• What can operators learn by taking a consumer perspective view to their pricing and inventory picture so that it’s consistent and strategic regardless of where the consumer searches and books?
Almost 2 years after I had initially done one of these cursory exploratories for pricing accuracy and consistency on local courses, it’s sad to see that not much has changed in the confusion sown for golfers wanting to book an online tee time and trying to easily and quickly figure out availability and accurate price comparisons for a given date/time range. One would assume that the technology revolution of the past 15 years should have made it easier for golfers by leveraging the power of the internet vs. the old game of calling around to various courses and making a hand-written table of options before calling back to book a time at the “winning” course. For all the talk of golf technology progress and prowess, my small experiment once again proved that we have a long way to go to meet golfer expectations of consistency, transparency and convenience in enabling them to confidently and quickly find a time at a course in their consideration set at an acceptable value and book it.
For our subscribers, read on to get the supporting facts to the above arguments. For our Executive Summary recipients, you can get the rest of the story one of three ways (all can be previewed and purchased at Pellucid’s website (www.pellucidcorp.com)):
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Contact:
Jim Koppenhaver, President, Pellucid Corp.
jimk@pellucidcorp.com
www.pellucidcorp.com
