Analysis: What Makes a Golf Course Great

For the last year or so, Golfstinks has been collecting information on what makes a golf course great. We intend to apply what we’ve learned to the Golfstinks Golf Course Rating System, which will rank every course at the state/province level and at the national level.

Why would we want to do this? Well, for one, it would be cool to have rankings for every course, wouldn’t it? Think about this scenario; You’re traveling to a city and want to squeeze in a round of golf while you’re there, but which course should you play? Just zip on over to Golfstinks.com’s course search, filter by location and then sort by course rankings – voilà, instantly find the highest ranked course within your price range, pack the clubs and enjoy!

Anyway, we created a survey and posed some pretty basic questions, including “How often do you play?” and “How much do you typically pay for greens fees?” But the meat of our survey asked; “Of the following six criteria, which is most important to you?” Here are those criteria:

• Difficulty
• Layout
• Grooming
• Hospitality
• Scenery
• Price

Recently, the survey reached 100 responses (thank you)! We’ve taken those initial 100 responses and have begun looking at what you said about a great golf course experience.

Findings
First, let’s take a look at who took the survey: That would be predominantly males (91%) between the ages of 50-59 (28%). The second most frequent age group was 30-39 (23%), followed by 40-49 (22%). These golfers predominantly play at public/muni courses (56%) and average 50 rounds or more annually (24%). It should be noted that 22 percent of the respondents average between 30 & 39 rounds annually, while 20 percent of them average between just 10 & 19 rounds annually.

Now onto the meat and potatoes: Of the criteria listed above (based on three possible answers: Very-, Somewhat-, and Not Important), most respondents (74 out of 100) chose “Layout” as a “Very Important” feature of their hypothetical great golf course. In addition, 71 chose “Scenery” and 69 chose “Grooming” as also “Very Important.” This came as somewhat of a surprise to the Golfstinks team. We figured scenery and grooming would be very important to most golfers, but layout?

We then asked respondents to rank the six criteria in order of importance to them (which forced them to reveal what they felt would be the most important feature of a great golf course). As with the previous question, “Layout” again proved important – receiving the most top votes (26). Then something interesting happened: “Price” garnered the second-most top votes with 24 (“Grooming” and “Scenery” only received 17 and 15 top votes respectively, placing them 3rd and 4th). What’s interesting about this is in the previous question, more respondents (49) felt “Price” was only “Somewhat Important” versus the 43 respondents that felt it was “Very Important.” Even more interesting, 23 respondents said “Price” was least important to them (which is just one less than those who felt it was most important)!

Perhaps not surprisingly, course “Difficulty” is not very important. In fact, it received the most least important votes (33) of the six criteria. Meanwhile, many respondents (55) said “Hospitality” was “Very Important” to them. But when the next question forced them to rank it amongst the other criteria, it placed second-to-last.

Some discussion on the findings:
While an appealing course layout is a matter of personal style, it’s clear golfers feel strongly about how a course is designed – even though individual opinions may differ from course to course (which makes it extremely difficult to establish what a good layout actually is). What we have learned is layout matters; and our ratings will reflect such.

Greens fees are another hard-to-guage area – it’s either the end-all, or just an after thought. To a good chunk of the respondents (26), price is everything – so much so, that cost was more important to them than any other course attribute (e.g. they’d rather the course be inexpensive than beautiful). Perhaps the current economy played a role in their answers, but remember, the whole point of the survey was positioned as “what makes a golf course great” – despite this, price was still an important factor to many, which is interesting. BTW, it should be noted that most respondents (46) said they typically pay between $40 & $60 for greens fees.

Conclusions
What we liked about this survey was how the first two questions checked each other. While our first survey question (asking if the 6 criteria were Very-, Somewhat-, or Not Important) established what an off-the-cuff reaction would elicit, the second question forced people to really think about which criteria was most important to them. In other words, we could have just casually asked a bunch of random golfers what their dream course would offer, but they would have just said the same for everything (e.g. good grooming, good layout, good hospitality, good scenery, good price). By forcing them to rank those criteria, we can now better pin-point what ingredients make a golf course great.

The survey did have some issues we hope to fix going forward. For example, our custom age ranges cannot be cross-tabulated with those from the US Census Bureau. In addition, it may be beneficial to have a question asking what makes a good course layout.

Overall though, these results are a promising start to weighting our course rating criteria. The original survey can be seen HERE. Feel free to comment below on how we can improve on our survey.