From Gaming & Leisure Magazine - Summer 2011
Golf & Spa, viewed as required leisure divisions by many resorts, have traditionally been marginal contributors to the bottom line. These departments have often required significant financial and labor commitments with a rather low rate of return on investment. Savvy leisure managers must consistently monitor activities to ensure they’re doing what is necessary to materially enhance the resort’s revenue stream to be considered viable. As it is with other departments at the resort, their profitability is essential.
Several Golf & Spa Management systems have been offering Business Intelligence tools (BI) that provide valuable data to assist managers in making appropriate decisions to ensure positive trends are enhanced and negative trends are corrected.
These BI tools are designed to indicate if revenues are falling or expenses are not in-line with anticipated revenues or budgeted amounts. The proactive manager will be able to make appropriate decisions to make corrections if enterprise data is provided in a consistent and understandable manner. BI is of little value if the data is inaccurate or becomes available too late for action to be taken.
Along with the providing revenue statistics specific to the leisure facility, BI systems will provide information on how Golf & Spa activities drive room rates, enhance low season demand, impact F&B revenues, capture new market segments and extend a guest’s length of stay at the resort.
Successful marketing strategies driving a leisure facility’s profitability will often depend on their ability to truly understand their clients and group them according to likely behaviors and potential value. Segmentation will be most valuable with clients are grouped according to a variety of data including behavior, lifestyle, past golf & spa treatment history, profitability, demographics, etc.
The lifetime spending of a leisure client is a valuable measure for the resort. Clients are categorized into different sets or segments based on this measure. The resort may have different strategies to keep guests happy based on their segment. The strategy would vary between a high-value client that has been a member for years and is on site several times each week versus a guest that hasn't been seen in months. Free guest passes may be a good perk for the high-value client, but free personal training sessions or golf lessons may re-engage a client who hasn't been around in a while.
The impact of BI can be traced throughout the business lifecycle, from converting guests into members, to deciding on a marketing campaign, to identifying which divisions are performing up to expectations, and to the number of spa therapists and golf caddies to be scheduled on a given day. With the reliable BI data, each leisure facility can analyze vital date for each of their fundamental key performance indicators such as Member Sales, Retail Product Sales, Greens Fees and Spa Treatment Sessions Sold.
A summary of some of the client-segmentation issues with BI include:
- Creating manageable segments with targeted activities, such as marketing campaigns.
- Identifying attributes with key requirements of each client group through integrated modeling. Setting attributes, needs and wants of each member group based on demographic, geographic, attitudinal and behavioral data.
- Establishing triggers to track and assess a client’s migration between segments to understand how marketing strategies have affected behavior.
- Determining segment-specific actions and differentiate the characteristics between the segments.
- Gaining a unified, integrated view of clients by pulling together data from all touch points and channels into a central database.
- Generate more accurate segments by using techniques and predictive modeling analysis to fine-tune corporate metrics.
- Gauge the impact of marketing activities by monitoring member response at all points, analyzing changes in behavior.
An important feature in implementing BI among different departments and locations is the ability to develop consistency in enterprise metrics. Inefficient business operations had commonly been ineffective in defining these metrics. Different business units had relied on different sources and methods to identify the metrics. In other cases, there would significant manual effort to derive the metrics. Yet another issue was the timeliness of data; the leisure director was not able to extract the relevant information in time to make appropriate decisions.
The ultimate goal in implementing BI effectively is to establish one universal source of current, accurate, and available information. Better information based on uniform data translates to better strategic and operational decisions, which in turn translates to a better bottom-line.
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