Are golf courses and resort complexes mortgaged to traditional Tour Operations and OTAs (Online Travel Agencies)?
Without a doubt, it is a topic to study in detail, since there are different situations that can cause resort complexes and golf courses to depend exclusively on these sales channels. After several meetings with executives of large holiday complexes and commercial directors, I have come to the conclusion that, although each of them has their own sales policy, they still do not analyze the possibilities of segmentation of the marketing channels that they have at their disposal , and most importantly, how to manage them.
Sales channel segmentation policies depend on various factors, such as:
Geographic situation. Depending on where our complex is located, we will have to analyze the sales potential to our local, regional or national public. There are destinations on the Islands that depend on different types of sales channels to fill their complexes due to their geographical location.
Market niches that demand your product. The climate, the sun, the infrastructure, the sports facilities, the nature are reasons that mortgage certain tourist destinations for markets in central and northern Europe.
Dependency on client-issuing cores. Do you depend on a hotel or hotels that generate clients for your golf course? Does your hotel depend on leisure centers, national and international events and the activities of the geographical area in which you are located to attract clientele? Many holiday resorts depend on customer cores.
As it is commonly said, “it is very nice to live on the middle street, and above all a great luck for those who live there and know how to take advantage of its resources. The reality is that not all of us live on that famous street, and even living in it we cannot mortgage all our products and services in it.
Conventional contracting is becoming obsolete, we are immersed in a time of commercial transition, where it is no longer just a matter of channeling our services through intermediaries, but we are forced to look for alternatives in the face of possible crises of those business-generating cores.
As an example, we can use the “dot com” crisis, the “decrease in volume of the British customer” due to the appearance of new destinations, or even the fateful “9/11” which stopped sales to the northern market. America.
It is by no means an attack on these great collaborators and necessary for the development of sales of our services, they are necessary marketing channels for our complexes, but without a doubt depending on them for more than 25% of our production is dangerous.
