THE SUCCESSFUL MINIATURE GOLF COURSE
Delivering maximum enjoyment, a satisfying experience and challenge
COURSE BUILD PROCESS
HOW TO ACHIEVE SUCCESS
The successful miniature golf course delivers maximum enjoyment, a satisfying experience and challenge, balanced with entertainment for the players. If you provide this, people will return to play again and again.
This can be achieved in a number of ways. First, the product needs to look and feel like it is well designed and sturdily constructed. There is typically a brawny, yet varied appearance in the hole designs. Putting surfaces/fairways are distinguishable, one from the other. Redundancy is minimal. Even more vital to the success of a course is that the playing experience be great! This means that the ball roll must be true and that the holes play as intended. A European tournament player describing his experience on a non-Castle course vs. a Castle course had this to say to us, “Too many random shots and true skill doesn't pay off enough. Like it does on your courses.”
Choice is a motivator for human beings, therefore most Castle Golf hole surfaces have multiple paths to the cup. Players have clearly distinctive choices to make with varied outcomes depending upon the selected path.
The hole surfaces are varied both within the holes and among the holes types. Some will be more difficult; and a few will incorporate our concept of “intentional luck”. This latter concept enables children and less skilled players to score as well as the adults and often better! High Five time! Children who must move on because they have used up the allotted number of strokes are not having a happy experience. With too much of this who would want a return experience?
There are other things that can be done as well, such as the event-filled final hole. Successful owners want the player-customers to leave the course having had a happy, memorable experience. Talking parrots are a lot of fun at that finishing hole of a tropically themed course. And, with the incentive, the ball gets returned.
Yet underneath it all, the great playing experience for all family members is vital. If the hole surface is not correctly crafted, the owner is left with a very formidable challenge to bring about a change in these concrete and steel components.
Another aspect to maximizing profit is to build courses that require minimal maintenance. One signature element that addresses this minimizing maintenance is Castle Golf's PermaCurb system, the steel reinforced concrete curb that looks like cut stone. It is a rigorous adherence to the principle of minimizing maintenance and another key to maximizing owner profits.
Castle Golf would be the choice for owners who recognize that they want the best in imagery and theme integrated into the course and the play of the holes. These are owners who recognize that quality is not just a word and that it translates into real product differentiation and profit as well.
Range owners will enhance their chances of competing successfully with the “stand alone” course when they recognize that they must provide a product that is the equal to or superior to the competing course at the local fun park or with the local ice cream and miniature golf course.
There is no reason to believe that miniature golf courses at driving ranges should in some way be different than the other courses unless the purpose and profit motive is different.
3-23-09 Copyright 2009 by Burdette Bremer
It was a pleasure to work with the team at Castle Golf! From the design to the completion of construction I found all whom I worked with to have the highest level of professionalism and integrity. All along the line they were responsive to our concerns. We found their services and product to be on the cutting edge of the industry. The end result is an award winning facility that has been enthusiastically received by our community. Our mayor has called the project a ‘ jewel for the city and a beautiful entrance on one of the main corridors for the city of Orem .
