Today, many golf courses recognize the difficulty of traveling with golf clubs, the increased demand for rental clubs and the need to offer rental equipment options. According to The Back Nine @ PinksandGreens.com, a golf blog for women, golf courses have noticed that flying with clubs prevents players from booking tee times, especially when destinations charge $50 - $60 per set, not including the rental fees for balls and shoes.
At Westfield Country Club Golf Course, we host larger events (100+ guests) and typically have requests for 5-10 sets of rental clubs from those who fly in to play Westfield’s championship courses. This has been consistent over many years until recently in 2010, when we began to notice higher demand for rental clubs. By the end of our “season,” our events were experiencing requests for 30 or more sets (three times our average) per event.
Once this phenomenon was identified as a definite trend, we explored the situation and quickly deduced that airline surcharges for golf clubs, as well as the need to insure golf bags or purchase decent travel golf bags, were influencing this change. It appears that more and more guests are willing to sacrifice familiarity of their own personal clubs for the sake of saving $100 or more on airline extra baggage fees. Players also see a benefit in avoiding the risk of having their clubs broken, mis-shipped or lost when flying.
In our case, we work diligently to provide the latest technology in clubs from most major manufacturers. In a couple instances, we were successful in selling new sets to guests who were introduced to clubs through our rental program, and fell in love with them.
While we had to borrow rental sets from other nearby clubs to meet this year’s unanticipated demand, we are currently budgeting for a significant increase in rental sets for the future, as we do not expect this trend to subside.
Have you noticed any significant trends in the demand for rental clubs at your golf course? How do you accomodate golfers who travel to play at your course?
Note: About Westfield Group Country Club
Our 36-hole private club is owned and operated by Westfield Insurance, a property casualty insurance and banking services company. Independent insurance agencies sell our insurance products and we use the club to nurture relationships with these agents and their customers from around our 21 operating states.
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