PRICE GUIDE, ST ANDREWS WEEKEND BREAK

Quite a lot of golf tour operators will take some low-season green fees, perhaps wrap them up with a budget hotel ‘offer’, and then present them as the dreaded “prices from”. Sure it makes for an eye-catching headline. Faraway Fairways could do the same. The question really though is does this help you at all? Probably not in most cases. Does it even help us? Well most golfers probably don’t appreciate having their hopes built up only for them to wade through the detail to discover that the price that caught their attention requires them to comply with all sorts of sub-optimal conditions, usually playing in the winter months, and using an accommodation that they’d perhaps rather not do.

In truth, very, very, few golfer’s actually buy package golf vacations off the shelf anyway. It’s far more common for golfers to have their requirements met by way of a bespoke proposal. For all practical purposes then, the price of Scottish golf vacations varies as people add or omit items. All that a majority of people seem to require is an honest, and broad ballpark figure which they can then use as their foundation to build from

Typical Price Range Guide –

LUXURY PEAK SEASON …………………….,£795
LUXURY SHOULDER SEASON ………….,,£675
LUXURY LOW SEASON …..,,……………..,£595

Highlights – St Andrews Old Course (ballot) otherwise, St Andrews New Course & St Andrews Jubilee Course

Duration – 2 days

Travel class – Luxury – Old Course hotel or Fairmont

Season – All year round

Transport – Chauffeur drive probably works just as well. Self drive also feasible

Guide price based on four golfers sharing two twin rooms, and transport costs divided by all

The St Andrews ‘shoulder season’ encompasses the last two weeks of April and the last two weeks of October

A typical golf programme has three major price components

Although it doesn’t have to be exclusively so, the cost of green fees tends to be the same for everyone regardless of how you set things up. You might like to think of the golf as ‘static’ therefore. The same is true of transport as well. A fourball party will usually generate a luggage manifest of eight items (4 suitcases and 4 golf bags). This means nearly everyone is going to be pushed towards the same transport solution, a 9-seater (9 luggage items) MPV (multi-purpose vehicle) such as a Mercedes Vito or similar. The variation in price tends to come form the accommodation therefore, and think of it as ‘dynamic’ rather than ‘static’.

Dynamic prices do alter dependent on the choices you make, the season you book for, and in the case of hoteliers that operate revenue yield management models outside of fixed rate contracts, the time of year you process a booking.

NON-GOLFERS

Perhaps the most obvious question is does removing the price of the golf work as an estimate for the cost of a non-golfer? In broad terms, yes, it’s a fairly reliable guide. Non-golfers can perhaps generate a few additional costs associated with visitor activities, but unless they’re indulging health spa treatments at some of the resort hotels, these are never comparable in price to a green fee. As a crude guide, the non golf estimates is usually about 75% of the corresponding price for the golf on a luxury option

This might sound discriminatory but it’s really a factor of the more expensive hotels contributing a bigger percentage share of the overall price than the less expensive ones. Basically golf is static and accommodation is dynamic

Faraway fairways

GOLF PLUS SCOTLAND

PRICE GUIDE, ST ANDREWS WEEKEND BREAK

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