membership offers

anyone seen and good offers that clubs are offering 2 clubs near me are offer £295 for 6 months and another i have see is a months for £49 but cant play before 4 pm on a saturday but 7 days when ever you like

so looks like my rant last year was right

I thought your rant was that weekend golfers should be offered weekend only rates by clubs who need more members. 

The main responses were that weekends were prime time so there didn't seem to be an economically viable way of introducing weekend only rates even if a club wanted more members.

The examples above are not for weekend only rates and one actually excludes the prime time of Saturdays before 4pm.

Good to see clubs offering different options though. Clubs needing to fill up their membership do need to be innovative to attract the shrinking customer base.

Even my well established club has started to allow members to pay by monthly direct debits rather than one payment per year.

Judy

PS Never underestimate the impact of grammar.

my rant was clubs should look a t the weekend thing but if they can offer deals to get people in then they should i know memeber of the clubs will not be happy if i joined for say £300 they paid £600 or more but the way round that is to make the cost the same for all lots of clubs need people to play on the course to make things pay you just look at teetimes and you can see how many are offer tee times on a saturday or sunday

Some clubs (like mine) have higher membership fees and don't allow use of the course by visitors at peak times.

Others have cheaper membership but have a set number of teetimes for visitors at peak times as these bring additional money into the club thus keeping the membership cost down.

They are just different business models - not saying one is right and one is wrong - you just join the type of club which suits you.

Seeing weekend teetimes advertised by a club doesn't necessarily mean they are underused and need members.

very true on some points but clubs that charge high fees then so be it but i think most clubs now see that people dont have as much money to spend than they may have had a few years ago so some are changing there ways which is what the post is about and as for teetimes there is a very posh club near me that offers slots on sunday so they must be looking for people to play and spend money in the club house

things have to change and people dont change they will get stuck in the dark ages

What makes a club 'posh'?

Anyway - Sundays aren't realy peak time at members clubs as the mens section is usually the biggest and their comps are on Saturdays - hence that is the busiest time.

Our club allows visitors late Saturdays and we also have teetimes available on Sundays (and all other days). The membership is currently closed so it isn't becasue we have too few members. It is just part of the business model and also as we are a Ryder Cup course it would be a bit mean to not allow visitors to try it out!

posh clubs are the ones that charge silly money to play on them, plus i think you have gone off the road on the topic

Not really gone off topic. The whole discussion was how you were happy that some clubs are offering different membership packages to suit different needs.

I pointed out that the different packages were merely based on different business models.

Some clubs do charge high membership fees but for that money the members do get rewarded by having lot of facilities and they don't struggle to get teetimes as there is limited access for visitors.

Other clubs charge less in membership fees but make up the difference in having lots of visitor teetimes.

You seem to be saying that my first example are 'posh' clubs.

I know our club does charge quite high green fees in the summer but that is because it costs a fortune to keep the course to a high standard. You can't expect to pay the same green fees across all courses regardless of the standard of the course. If a course holds The Open regional qualifying then surely you would expect to pay higher green fees as it costs more to maintain the course to that higher standard.

I guess it gets my goat a little to hear more expensive clubs called 'charging silly money' when you really do get what you pay for. 

i know it cost a lot of money to keep places going ok your club may be one that gets used for major golf events, but the clubs that charge silly money to play on then people or societys will only play maybe once if people have the money then its there choice to pay and play there but all i am saying is there is plenty of clubs that are just as good but need people to keep them going and are looking at diffrent options for more players i would love to join a club that will not cost me a arm and a leg so i can take my daugher playing with me (good way to get away from the wife)

A lot of clubs around my way (south Shropshire) have deals on.

Church Stretton is now 250 pounds full membership for the first year (460 full membership)

Welshpool new to golf 150 pounds April - end Sept plus 12 lessons! (380 full membership)

Kington have a new to golf deal also.

Arscott, Shrewsbury 200 pounds for after 2pm summer, after noon in winter. (550 full membership)

Even Ludlow have dropped their joining fee.

My club have dropped member fees for the under 30's. Starting at £250 for a 7 day if you're 23, and rising by £50 per year older you are until you pay the 'full membership' as it were that the over 30's pay. It has enticed a dozen or so new younger members, but I fear many of these will jump ship to better courses when the prices even out in a few years.

Interesting discussions... here are a few points that spring to my mind...

• I am lucky to have many, many clubs around my area most who accept pay and play outside of hours reserved for members' competitions. The recession does not seem to have affected full membership fees which start around £800 and go up rapidly. There are some interesting deals around though. I joined Reigate Hill last year - starts at £295 for which you get credits to play, you can enter monthly stableford/medal comps but not trophy comps, there are other restrictions as well but what do you expect - cut price, cut benefits - fine by me. Other offers include a one-off fee of £100 and discounted green fees / benefits - not as good as Reigate Hill but interesting deals.
• With pretty much everything in life - you get what you pay for. Pay £100 for a TV from Tesco and it won't be as good as a top brand - don't expect it to be. Pay £500 for gold membership - don't expect the course and facilities to be as good as a £1,000+ club. You have a choice.
• Finally, in these days of "equality to all" where do we stand on offering discounted membership according to age. We cannot offer different memberships according to race, religion, sexual preference etc and we have recently seen clubs having to change their policies on men vs ladies memberships. Is membership according to age discriminatory???

Mmmmmm

Hi Paul, What do you get for your £295 of credits at reigate. I am looking for a deal of the sort Karl has been ranting about as I dont get a lot of weekdays off. Reigate is about 15 mile away so not too much of a treck.

Dave CAC handed Geordie.

Hi Dave,

It is a really good deal for me. The basic package, "flexible" starts at £295 - all you get for this is 295 credits to play with - generally a round paid for with credits will be 20% less than visitor price (e.g. 28 credits instead of £35 peak Saturday rate).

You can scale this up to "flexible plus" membership. For this they charge an admin fee and EGU fees but this then allows you to get a handicap and play in "non-trophy" comps.

This year I went for "silver" flexi-plus that got me 450 credits for just under £450 including all extra fees.

For me it is ideal as I can't commit (from both financial and time points of view) to full membership. I play the occasional medal/stableford and keep my handicap going. You need to work out how many rounds you will get for your credits and whether that suits you. From all the non-standard memberships I have seen I think it is the best value option.

There was generally a weekend medal and stableford each month over the winter. Now that the summer has started there are a lot of trophy comps on and it seems to have reduced to either a medal or stableford at weekends. They are available on weekdays also but, like you, I struggle to make these.

Oh yes, and you get to use your members card over the bar which gets you 10% off.

I think you have just missed an open day which is a shame as you could have come down and tried the course for free.

More details on website here.... http://www.reigatehillgolfclub.co.uk/membership.htm

Let me know if you have any more questions...

Cheers

I also thought the reduced membership based on age was interesting and potentially legally wrong but there is a loophole that you can use for a limited time period to allow reduced fees for any specific demographic you need to increase memebrship of.

It has to be time limited and also numbers limited. E.G. at my club we do need more lady members so there is an offer on at the moment (not sure what it is) which stope after a set time period or when we reach a certain number of new members, whichever is first.