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Advance Booking for Foursomes
In addition to holding golfers accountable to their booked tee times, we implemented a "foursome only" policy which essentially gave advance booking to foursomes and a shorter booking window to twosomes. When we first introduced this policy in 2019 we only allowed foursomes to book and play on weekends and holidays before 11:30am; twosomes had to play after 11:30am or book last minute. This helped to prevent gaps in prime time if we weren't able to pair up twosomes or pair a single with a threesome. However, if the tee sheet still had available tee times the day before, we opened up the tee sheet for last minute bookings for groups smaller than four. With the success of these protocols in 2019, we implemented the same policy 7-days a week until 1:30pm for the 2020 season.
By giving advance booking to foursomes, and thereby restricting when twosomes can book during certain time periods, we went from having 86 unpaired twosomes in 2018 to only 8 unpaired twosomes in 2020, an increase in revenue of over $12,000 between June - September.
- Move tee time bookings online. This automates the booking restrictions and you are not relying on staff to enforce and communicate policies, consequences, and other important information that may need to be conveyed when booking a tee time.
- if you absolutely cannot move all bookings online, instead you can train staff that do reservations to first ask how many people are playing before recommending an available tee time.
- Select a time frame to restrict twosomes from booking and consequently provide advance booking to foursomes during those times. We don't allow twosomes to book earlier than 1:30pm daily, or 12:00pm daily during the winter months.
- Take a look at where the most gaps on your tee sheet are with twosomes taking spots that foursomes could have booked and make that your time frame. You can start by applying the booking restrictions on your busiest days and move towards booking restrictions every day if that is your eventual goal.
- Apply the booking restrictions through your online booking module. We use Club Prophet Systems (CPS) for our tee sheet so when we program the back end we are technically restricting twosomes from booking at certain times. At this time, CPS does not allow you to restrict threesomes from booking at a certain time so as a work around we just use twosomes and threesomes in our policy wording, even though the system allows threesomes to book.
- Communicate your advance booking / booking restrictions. Again, this is not something to hide or be secretive about--you want golfers to know about your booking policies to decrease confusion. Post it on the online booking page, put it in the tee time confirmation email, add it into the tee time reminder email.
- Instead of not allowing twosomes to book at all, we found it worked to have different booking windows for foursomes and twosomes. Foursomes can book 30 days in advance any time and twosomes can book after 3pm the day before they wish to play if they want to tee off before 1:30pm, or 30 day advance booking if they want to play after 1:30pm.
- Have a clear statement ready near each phone so that staff can properly communicate this policy and the reasons behind it to golfers when they call. This policy is definitely a little more controversial than just holding golfers accountable to their reservations so make sure that staff are equipped to handle questions.
- One of our statement focuses is that having foursomes playing in back to back tee times during the bulk of the day actually sets a better pace of play for the entire course and provides a better golfing experience overall.
Negative feedback: at first, you will very likely get pushback from golfers, specifically those that like to golf on weekends at 10am in a twosome. You can expect to receive some angry phone calls and hear a lot of "I am never golfing there again" but don't let it bother you too much. In the long run, you are rewarding the golfers that you want to return to the course time and time again: the golfers that are willing to put the effort in to make a foursome and show up to their tee time!
If you have further questions regarding these policies and their implementation, feel free to contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.