Golf simulator membership software: what to check

You have decided to sell memberships. Good. Recurring money is the difference between a venue that has a nice March and a venue that has a nice year.

Now you need software that can actually run them, which is where a lot of it falls over. Six things to check, roughly in the order they will bite you.

1. It has to be part of your booking system

A membership is not a list of names. It is a pricing rule that has to fire the second somebody picks a slot. This one gets 20% off. That one has 90 minutes left in the pot. That one cannot book a Saturday at all. Software that keeps your members somewhere separate from your bookings cannot enforce a word of it, so the job lands on whoever is on the desk, and whoever is on the desk is busy.

A membership your booking page cannot see is just a fact about somebody that a member of staff has to remember at half four on a Saturday.

2. It supports the plan shape you actually want to sell

There are four, and the venues that do this well tend to run two or three at once. An unlimited plan for the truly afflicted, a credit bundle for the regulars, and a cheap off-peak plan to put bodies in the building on a wet Tuesday morning.

The test is not whether the sales page lists all four. It is whether you can build a second plan of a different shape yourself, on a Tuesday, without anyone at the other end having to flip something on your behalf. If the answer involves raising a ticket, that is your answer. Which model to actually pick is a separate question, and worth settling before you buy anything.

3. Off-peak and restricted plans, down to the hour

The cheap plan is what makes memberships work at a busy venue, and it only works if the restriction is real. You want days, hours, and ideally bay types, so that a £39 weekday plan cannot stroll into your Saturday afternoon and make itself at home.

Ask about the horrible one on the demo rather than in month two. A window running 21:00 to 02:00 crosses midnight, and a surprising number of systems have never once considered it. If you trade late and want to sell those hours, find out early.

4. Credits, and what happens when they run out

Credit plans are the safest bet for a venue with real peak demand, because you are selling a known quantity rather than an open bar. They also have one moment that tells you everything about the software underneath, and that is the booking that goes over.

Three sane answers. Block it, charge full price, or cover what the credits cover and charge the rest at an overage rate you set. The right one is yours to pick, not the software’s. While you are in there, ask whether unused credits roll over, and whether you can cap the rollover, so the chap who vanishes every summer does not come back in September with a fortnight of free golf.

5. Recurring billing, and failed payments

Taking the first payment is the easy bit. It is payment number fourteen that decides whether any of this works. Cards expire, banks decline things for reasons known only to banks, and if that ends with a member stood at a locked bay looking cross, you have lost them over an admin detail.

What you want: automatic retries across the following week, an email to the member, access left alone while all that happens, and a clear state at the end if it never resolves. Ask who is holding the card details, too. If the answer is anything other than a proper payment processor, leave.

6. What members can do without phoning you

Every membership action a member cannot do themselves turns into a phone call to your desk, on a Saturday, while somebody stands there waiting to pay for a coffee. Three that matter:

• Cancel. Hiding this does not keep members. It generates chargebacks. Let people go cleanly and a good few of them wander back.
• Pause and resume. The underrated one. It lets somebody skip January without having to decide they are done with you, and a paused member is far easier to win back than a cancelled one.
• Update a card. Otherwise every expired card in your member list becomes your problem to chase.

What it should cost

Look at the pricing model, not just the headline number. Per-member pricing means your bill goes up every time you do the thing you bought the software to do, which takes some nerve. Commission on membership payments is the same trick wearing a hat. Flat monthly pricing, with card fees passed through at cost, leaves the upside where it started.

Memberships in BookMyBays

All six of the above, in the box. Membership plans are sold from your own booking page. Monthly or weekly, unlimited, credits, season passes, or a straight member discount. Plans can be held to the days, hours and bay types you meant, including a window that runs past midnight. Stripe handles the recurring billing, the retries and the invoices, and members buy, pause, cancel and resume themselves without anybody picking up a phone.

You can tempt people in with a discounted first month, applied at signup with no code to hand out, and members see the intro price and the normal price side by side so month two is not a shock. It is part of the flat monthly price rather than a per-member charge, so selling more memberships costs you nothing extra.

Frequently asked questions

Related reading

• Golf membership models that work: sims, ranges and courses
• Best booking software for indoor golf simulators
• How to add a loyalty program to your golf simulator booking software