The Power Of The Web

UK Handicap; 3.3 USGA Handicap; 1.7

The last week has seen me start to enter some of my competitions for next year. It's interesting to see how golf clubs market themselves differently, and the varying degrees of importance they place to their web presence.

Some club websites I visit haven't yet posted the dates of their tournaments for 2011, some have the dates up but no entry forms, and the two that I have managed to enter so far have given a very different user experience.

I posted last year about the race to get an entry in the Craw's Nest Tassie, a 6 day event played at Carnoustie in September. I made it in last year, and was primed for the entry form going live at 7pm last Monday.

As expected, the website started slowing down nearer 7pm as traffic to the site increased, but come 7pm itself the site was barely responding to requests, and I had a nervous 5 minute wait for the entry form to even appear. Wait that long last year and you were on the reserve list.

When the form appeared, I quickly put all my details in and pressed submit. Like before, the site was barely responding and I had the dilemma; is it my connection, my processer or the Carnoustie website. I run my laptops off fast processers and 20Mb broadband, so I suspected it was the Carnoustie site. Fortunately, 4 minutes later, and before I even received a message on my screen, an email popped through to my Blackberry informing me I had been successful and was in the competition. The confirmation screen appeared a few minutes later and I was able to go through and pay my entry fee.

Or so I thought. When I was diverted through to the payment site, it was hooked up to a test server, instead of a live server that could accept real money. It was 22 hours before an email came out asking people who did submit a payment to resubmit on the now correctly hooked-up payment server.
Also, every time I navigated to the Carnoustie website, even if I didn't type anything, I got another copy of the confirmation email telling me I was in the tournament. I ended up with 9 of these emails by the end of the week.
The bottom line is that I got into the tournament, so all's well that ends well. I feel bad criticising Carnoustie about this, because they are trying to make things easier, and I'd give them 10/10 for trying, but in terms of execution, the process was a shambles. I've spoken to people who had to wait a lot longer than I did for the entry form to appear, and it appears that the system was not tested properly before it went live.

The following night I had a look at the Monifieth Links website, as I will be playing in their 18 hole open at the start of August. They have recently gone live with a booking system, it is operated by BRS Golf, who provide this service for over 500 clubs in the UK and Ireland.

I have to say I was absolutely astounded with how good the system is.
Members and visitors alike can view and book available tee times months in advance, and Open competitions can also be booked and paid for online. I entered the Open competition for 2 people, chose my tee time, and paid for it in the space of 5 minutes. No forms to fill in, nothing to send, no waiting about to see if I got in and what my tee time is.

This is a really progressive piece of software, and is obviously used by clubs who are aware of the importance of moving with the times and giving power to the people to see and book what they want. The more transparent clubs are with their availability and ease of booking tee times, the more tee times will inevitably be booked. Tee times aren't a secret, I guess that some clubs feel that they are losing control if everything is visible on the internet. The reality is that clubs don't lose any control, they just pass the functional processing on to the end user instead of requiring staff to do it all for them.

As for the golf itself, another quiet week, hitting 100 balls on Sunday was all that happened, this weekend sees a match on Saturday, and again, due to being dark by 4.30pm every night, that will be it for the week.