Business

Mixing the two is good for
everyone, especially courses
that host corporate outings


Right: The lobby of the palatial Grandover Resort in Greensboro,
which gets 60 percent of its business from corporate golf outings

By David Droschak

The airport hotel is where a lot of companies used to hold their board meetings, sales seminars, staff retreats and other such events. The location was convenient, meeting rooms were plentiful and the food was, well, edible. There was one downside, though. Just about everyone looked for an opportunity to slip away for a few hours to do something they really enjoyed, like playing golf.

But then an unknown meeting planner who should be in someone's hall of fame had a brilliant idea. Instead of holding that big meeting at the airport hotel or the downtown convention center and losing a lot of attendees to the golf course, why not just meet at the golf course?

And so an industry was born.

Corporate golf outings have exploded in popularity in the past few years, so much so that Dal Raiford, director of golf at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, says “I'm not so sure it hasn't replaced the corporate picnic.”

Raiford is amazed that the swank resort in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which has a Donald Ross-designed course on the property but really doesn't promote itself as a golf resort, hosted 200 outings past year. “We're not a golf-driven destination, we're not a golf resort, we're a resort with a golf course,” he says.

Raiford knows the corporate golf outing business is now critical to Grove Park's success, having more than doubled in the past nine years. Every golfer who walks on the course during an outing is a potential customer in the future.

A clearer example of the trend is Grandover Resort in Greensboro, a luxury hotel that just happens to be surrounded by two excellent golf courses. The courses logged 30,000 rounds last year — or 60 percent of its business — from corporate outings. Those two are not alone.

And it's not just resorts that are cashing in. Private courses, normally closed on Mondays for maintenance work, have started logging dozens and dozens of outings each year.

“For a private club, outings are a great opportunity to expose the golf course as well as the community to perspective buyers as well as people who are a good source of referrals,” says Kevin Hine, general manager of River Landing off Interstate 40 in Wallace. “They are a revenue stream that allows the club to retain well-trained staff, have longer hours of operation and provide better products and services to the club's members.”

Hine says 2001 bookings for corporate outings at his Duplin County course are already up 10 percent over a year ago.

In the past, The National in Pinehurst, a private course designed by Jack Nicklaus, generally relied on word of mouth to land corporate outings. Now, the course uses direct mailings to solicit the business in Raleigh, Greensboro, Charlotte and other areas.

“I get a lot of companies that come down here that take care of their clients or employees with a little getaway,” says Tom Parsons, director of golf at The National. “In terms of the price, it's something a company can afford to do instead of sending you to Jamaica or on a cruise. You are covering a lot of people, you get to know them better in an environment that is really conducive to camaraderie.”

What does Parsons do with the extra $4,000 or $5,000 the course makes per outing? Make his members happy.

“We pour that all back into the golf course,” he says. “I've been at a private club for 14 years and to have those Monday outings are critical to maintain the standards of what you try to have at your club.”

The Pinehurst experience

Pinehurst Resort and Country Club, undoubtedly the king of corporate outings in the Tar Heel state, hosts hundreds of these events per year. One of the largest is held by Toro, the lawn mower company whose machinery helps cut the greens at the club. Toro's outing included 600 people over a 15-day period.

With any business transaction, selection, service and value are important items, if not the bottom line for most clients. Pinehurst certainly has the market cornered on selection, offering eight golf courses at different price levels for its customers.

Most golfers have heard of the famed No. 2 course that hosted the 1999 U.S. Open. But the difficulty and the price — $295 a pop in peak season — may not be for everyone.

“Playing No. 2 is more of a social-driven thing,” says Debbie Bureau, one of Pinehurst's senior sales managers. “Your corporate group, the high-end groups, will want to play No. 2. They don't mind forking the $300 over for (each of) 144 people.

“Have we ever turned down business on No. 2? Yes, if they wanted a discounted rate on it. The nice thing about that is if you have a group that has a budget, we have eight golf courses so we do have flexibility. They can't play No. 2 and get a $50 rate.”

Courses Nos. 4 and 8 cost $205 a person during outings in peak season, while the lowest price is $88 for Nos. 1 and 3.

Bureau worked in the New York and New Jersey markets before Pinehurst and has noticed a difference in attracting corporate business to the Sandhills.

“Rates in the Northeast may not be quite as challenging,” Bureau says. “They want the service, and if they want to play No. 2, for example, they'll want it no matter what and they'll pay for it.

“When you work more of the North Carolina market, yes, businesses are definitely more rate conscious. And they have a lot more places to compete with. They can shop around. It's getting tougher out there. There are a lot more competitive resorts that are coming online, but if they're looking for Pinehurst and they want the great golf, this place is hard to beat.”

Another key to attracting corporate outings is meeting space. Pinehurst once couldn't offer a lot once in this area but built a 50,000-square-foot conference center a decade ago.

In Sunset Beach, Sea Trail Plantation has added a 30,000-square-foot conference center to boost its meetings space to more than 70,000 square feet. Add in three golf courses designed by highly acclaimed architects Dan Maples, Rees Jones and Willard Byrd and the resort believes it can compete with anyone in the state for corporate outing business.

“This is real unique for this area of the world,” says Nancy Foster, Sea Trail's marketing director. “I don't really know of any other place where you can do all that you can do here in one facility on the North Carolina coast.

“What we're trying to capture is all those North Carolina business citizens who have been going to Myrtle Beach because North Carolina didn't offer them what they needed,” Foster adds. “We were losing things like lawyer's associations and doctor's associations and all that kind of stuff down to Myrtle Beach because there was no place for them to meet.”


Finding the right niche

Many courses and resorts competing for the golf outing business have found that it's beneficial to have a niche, an unusual quality, to make them stand out in the crowd.

For example, Ballantyne Resort in Charlotte, which boasts the Dana Rader Golf School, gives customers at outings a series of eight photographs of their swing. And Pine Needles is in the process of completing a lighted, four-hole executive course where business people can slip away after an evening meeting.

“While the practice course was designed for our learning center and golf schools, it was also designed for a group of guys and gals to go out at night and take just a pitching wedge and sand wedge and a putter and have some group training,” says Kelly Miller, general manager of Pine Needles.

Sea Trail has a natural attraction for customers — the beach.

“When you have a meeting it's not just the space,” Foster says. “No offense, but why would anyone from Greensboro drive all the way down here to have a meeting when they have meeting space in Greensboro. The thing is you're getting your people away, giving them something different to look at because sometimes you can't see the forest through the trees.”

Tobacco Road, a public course in Sanford that opened in 1999 and was voted the state's best new course of the year by North Carolina magazine, has started landing hundreds of business golfers a year from Research Triangle Park. The course never used to accept American Express. It does now since its corporate business has exploded.

“I've seen cell phones and pagers and faxes on the course — you don't have to be in an office any more,” says Joe Gay, Tobacco Road's director of golf. “I've even seen laptops go out on our golf course. There is more technology out there in some of my carts on any given Saturday than inside my pro shop.”

Most golf and business officials agree that corporate outings are directly tied to the economy. The robust outlook in the late 1990s gave businesses reasons to reward employees or clients with corporate outings, as well as use them as tools to train workers.

“Golf is a venue that for the most part provides a very pleasant experience for those involved, and it is a way for a business or charity or group to get four to six hours of someone's undivided attention,” says Hine. “In this day and age, you are certainly not going to go into a business and ask for a four-hour meeting. It is a very effective tool for businesses.”

“It's a thank-you to their employees and their customers,” Gay adds. “It's just a good thing just to get away instead of getting that fruit cake that has been circulated for so long. People feel like they're stealing because they can get a day off and play a round of golf and write it off on their expense report.”

The trend in the 1990s was also to look at more of an upscale outing experience.

“Some people that moved over to our course had sticker shock at the beginning, but they saw they got a different type of experience,” Grandover's Jerry Lotich says about his course's $85 price tag per person. “I heard one story about when a company used to have this tournament in Greensboro and three days before the tournament the boss would say, `Hey, who would like to play in this tournament on Monday?' Now, when it comes to playing Grandover, the boss takes the invitation and sticks it in his own pocket.”

But there has been somewhat of a slowdown recently in the business.

“Business has been very plentiful, but these things work in cycles,” says Lotich. “The savvy businessman knows there is going to be a down cycle coming. I have to make sure my big customers are happy with me because there is going to be a lot of competition for that business.”

That means Lotich is on the phone daily trying to land repeat customers and making sure they're happy. An example is Chrysler, which entertains during the annual PGA Tour tournament it sponsors in late April. Others include numerous furniture companies, which entertain during the spring and fall markets.

“We continue to see the same faces. I would say our repeat business is well near 70 percent,” Lotich says. “One of the things we do is when we get a new piece of business, we make sure everybody who was here the year before is accounted for. We've started working with these groups to book two, three and four years out.”


Everybody wants to play

There have been some problems with the increased popularity of the golf outing. Everybody wants to play, including some whose only experience with a golf ball has been buying a dozen for someone's Christmas present.

Courses are more crowded, play is generally slower and there often are a handful of golfers out there who are experiencing the game for the first time.

“We have a tremendous amount of non-golfers, or who would be previously called novices, participating in golf events,” says Raiford of Grove Park, “so much so that we have taken our presentation down to the very fundamental level of information and instruction as to how to manage your way around the golf course. Not to play better golf, but to simply survive and get back in within five hours.

“It's not unusual at all to have an 80-player group that has 45 sets of club rentals. That indicates the non-serious golfer.”

So, what's the real value of a corporate golf outing?

Judy Thompson of the National Golf Foundation sums it up best. “You've got somebody's undivided attention for four or five hours,” she says. “You are playing golf and learning about each other, learning about how they conduct themselves, how they deal with stress, decision-making, what they're like under different situations.

“That's a fair amount of time you're going to have with a person that you won't have over lunch or dinner or in a board room or any social place.”

And in the end, it's service that the business client is after.

“We all sell something that's fairly generic — golf, a hotel room or a meal,” says Miller of Pine Needles. “Ultimately, what corporate America really wants is the service. That's what we try to place the emphasis on. The better job we can do the better repeat business we can get.”

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