Burggolf boss Marcel Wellings has recently opened the International course near Schiphol airport, his company’s biggest investment to date. He talks to Adam Lawrence about the course, and golf in the Netherlands

The Dutch golf market has been one of the most dynamic in Europe over the past five years. Top clubs in the Netherlands, from Royal Hague to Noordwijk and Hilversum, have shown themselves willing to invest significant sums in improvement work to their courses, and a significant number of new developments have come on stream.

Marcel Welling has been one of the leaders of the growth of golf in the Netherlands. As CEO of Burggolf, the country’s largest golf operator, running ten courses across the country, it’s fair to assume that more golfers have learned the game on courses run by Welling than anywhere else.

Throughout its history, Burggolf has specialised in affordable public courses. Now, though, the company has moved into a new segment, running the recently opened International course developed next to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.

“Schiphol’s management had been trying to develop the site next to the airport for many years,” says Welling. “We became involved in 2010, just as construction was underway.”

The International, run by a sister company of Burggolf, although still owned by Schiphol’s property development subsidiary, is a departure for Welling. Designed by Bruno Steensels of Belgian architecture practice Mastergolf (it’s marketed as an Ian Woosnam signature project), the course is his first play in the high end of the golf market. Steensels and his team have sculpted the flat 75 hectare site to resemble rolling linksland, and reports from early players have been very favourable. Though open for green fee play, the ultimate goal is to operate as an elite private club.

Welling’s course is not the only top end project to open recently in the Netherlands. Further to the west, development firm Made in Scotland has built the Dutch course, designed as a Colin Montgomerie signature by European Golf Design. But Welling is confident his product will match up. “I like the Dutch, it is a very good course,” he says. “But we have a significant location advantage, as we’re much closer to Amsterdam city, and right next to the airport. So for businesspeople considering membership, we’re an easier choice.”

Welling, of course, is more than just a golf course operator. For many years an active leader in the Dutch industry, he was one of the key founders of the European Golf Course Owners Association, only stepping down as the association’s first president at the end of last year. He is passionate about the need for commercial course owners to work together for continuing professional development purposes, especially given the difficult environment golf businesses still face across the continent.

“The European golf market remains very challenging,” he says. “Green free income is down in most countries, traditional style memberships are under pressure, and corporate golf is declining or dead. There has been a fall in spending on both F&B and on merchandise too. So if we’re to prosper then we have to innovate, keep costs under control and find ways of attracting more golfers to our courses. Obviously, we all compete with each other, but I think the golf industry will stand or fall together.”

What makes planning more difficult still is the impact of short term conditions on golf course businesses. It wasn’t hard, back in 2008, for course operators to predict that they were in for a rocky ride, though few could have known just how rocky it would be. But short term issues have a massive effect too. The bad weather that affected many during the summer of 2012 is an excellent example: in the UK, with a fine and early spring, courses reported great figures for the first few months of the year. As the weather took a turn for the worse, though, things changed, and by December, many were talking about significant holes in their revenues for the year as a whole.

Positive, even ebullient by nature, Welling prefers to focus on things that operators can control. Player retention is a particular passion. He believes the golf business has got significantly better at attracting new players, but has much work to do as far as keeping them in the game is concerned. “A recent research study in Finland talked to 1,000 beginner golfers,” he says. “After their first training course, asked whether they intended to continue playing golf, 90 per cent said they did. But the reality is that only around 20 per cent actually do so. Obviously, these figures will vary from course to course, and country to country, but we all need to know exactly what happens at our course. We can’t afford to be losing customers at this rate – we need to get much better at binding new players to the game. In the fitness industry, it is known that new members who don’t go to the gym eight times in the first three months of their membership are generally going to be lost to the industry. We need similar metrics in golf. And then we need to do something about it! But crises are the best time for change. Now, we have the opportunity to recreate our golf businesses – to ensure that we understand how beginners think, and what membership models will work now and in the future. We have to make golf as important for newcomers to the game as it is for those who have played for many years. That means making them feel at home at the golf club, and working to ensure they have the social connections at the club that will bring them back. We need to tailor price structures to our customers’ needs, not to stick to the structures we have always used. If we do that, we can reinvent the golf business, and make it stronger than ever.”

This article appeared in issue 31 of Golf Course Architecture, published January 2013