The Gap Nobody’s Talking About

Here is a question I find myself asking almost every week: “If a hotel served the food and coffee that most golf clubs serve, how long would it survive?” The answer, in most cases, is “not very long at all”. And yet, across the golf industry, we continue to treat food and beverage as a necessary cost rather than an opportunity. We talk endlessly about course conditioning, green speeds, and tee-time technology. We invest in irrigation systems and GPS-enabled buggies – yet the place, where members gather, where they sit down together, break bread, share a drink, and build relationships is often an afterthought. This is the gap – or the opportunity – golf should be looking at. Current approaches are often costing golf clubs far more than they realise.
 

The Expectation Shift
 

Twenty years ago, a golf club could get away with a tired sandwich menu, instant coffee, and a bar that felt like it hadn’t been reconsidered since the 1980s. Members expected little from the catering, and little is what they got. Nobody complained, because nobody knew any different. That world no longer exists. Your members now drink flat whites from independent roasters on their way to work. They eat at restaurants, where every detail, from the plate to the playlist, has been meticulously considered. They order via apps that remember their preferences, their allergies, their favourite table. They have been educated, whether they realise it or not, by a hospitality industry that has raised its standards dramatically in the last decade. And then they walk into their golf club … The disconnect is immediate and it is felt, even if it is rarely articulated. Members may not say “your coffee is no good” or “this menu is basic”. What they say instead is “I don’t tend to eat here much” or “we usually go somewhere else after a round.” The language is polite, but the message is clear: this part of the club experience is not meeting the standard they have come to expect everywhere else in their lives.
 

More Than a Meal
 

The temptation, when clubs recognise this gap, is to fix it with a menu refresh or a new coffee machine. And those things matter. But the real issue runs deeper than the product. Food and beverage at a golf club is not just about ‘feeding people’. It is about ‘gathering people’. Breaking bread together is one of the oldest human rituals we have. It is how trust is built, how friendships deepen, how communities form. The dining room, the bar, the terrace on a summer evening, these are not peripheral to the membership experience. For a very large proportion of your members, they are the membership experience. People do not join golf clubs purely to play golf. They join for community, connection, and a sense of belonging to something. You cannot reliably deliver those things without food and beverage at the centre of the experience. I have worked with clubs across the UK for the last couple of years, from progressive modern venues to historic Top 100 courses. The pattern is remarkably consistent. Successfully clubs understand that F&B is as important to the experience as the speed of the greens. They do not treat their F&B operation as a cost centre to be managed. They treat it as an opportunity to create an experience.
 

The Commercial Case
 

Let me be frank about the numbers, because this is not only a philosophical argument. A member, who eats and drinks at the club regularly, is a member, who is deeply embedded in the social fabric of that club. They are harder to lose. Their lifetime value is significantly higher. They bring guests who become members. They become advocates. Conversely, a member, who never uses the clubhouse, who plays their round and leaves, has a transactional relationship with the club that is far easier to walk away from. When renewal time comes, what exactly are they renewing? A tee time? That is a commodity – community is not. The clubs I see getting this part right are not necessarily spending more money. They are spending it more thoughtfully. They are investing in training their teams to deliver warmth, not just service. They are curating menus based upon quality, rather than trying to be everything to everyone. They are creating spaces that people want to spend time in, rather than spaces they pass through on the way to the car park.
 

The Welcome Mat
 

There is another dimension to this that the industry cannot afford to ignore. Golf has a well-documented accessibility problem. For many people, the traditional golf club feels intimidating: the etiquette, the dress codes, the unwritten rules. It is a sport that has not always made it easy for newcomers to feel they belong. And yet, off-course golf is booming. Venues like Topgolf, Pitch and Popstroke have built thriving communities, and here is the thing that should make every club manager think: many of their regular visitors go there for a drink or a quick lunch on a workday without hitting a single ball. The F&B is the draw. The social experience is the product. Hospitality, by its very nature, is welcoming. It opens the door. It says, “you belong here.” In a sport that can feel exclusive and closed off, that matters enormously. If the journey from a driving range to a club membership feels like a leap, it is often the coffee, the sandwich, the warmth of the welcome that builds the bridge. The clubs that understand this are not just retaining members – they are growing the game.
 

Running Towards People

The world is moving rapidly towards digitalisation and optimisation. Every part of our lives is being automated, streamlined, made more efficient. I believe golf clubs should be running in the opposite direction: towards people, towards warmth, towards genuine human connection. I’ll die on this hill. Food and beverage is the simplest and most powerful way to do that. A genuinely great coffee, served with a smile and someone who remembers your name. A menu that shows care and thought, not just a basic service. A team that makes you feel welcomed, not processed. These are not luxuries. In 2026, they are the baseline expectation. The gap between what members experience outside the club on the High Street, and what they experience inside it is only growing. The clubs that close that gap will be oversubscribed for years to come. The clubs that ignore it will find themselves asking, in five or ten years’ time why their membership numbers are not what they once were.
 

The gap is clear, the opportunity is enormous – and the conversation starts here.

Author: Tony Adams | golfmanager 2/26

Tony Adams ist Geschäftsführer von ,Hospitality in Golf‘, einem in Großbritannien ansässigen Beratungsunternehmen, das sich darauf spezialisiert hat, das Gastronomieerlebnis in Golfclubs und -resorts neu zu gestalten. Mit seiner langjährigen Erfahrung in Führungspositionen im Gastgewerbe und in der Betriebsberatung arbeitet Tony mit Clubs in ganz Großbritannien zusammen – von fortschrittlichen, modernen Anlagen bis hin zu historischen Top-100-Plätzen – und hilft ihnen dabei, ihre Gastronomiekonzepte als strategische Priorität statt als unvermeidbare Kosten zu betrachten. Als leidenschaftlicher Verfechter der Rolle der Gastronomie beim Aufbau einer echten Gemeinschaft schreibt Tony täglich auf LinkedIn über die Kultur, Standards und das unternehmerische Denken, die außergewöhnliche Cluberlebnisse von gewöhnlichen unterscheiden. Seine Arbeit stützt sich auf Beobachtungen aus der Praxis in den renommiertesten Golfclubs Großbritanniens, kombiniert mit Erkenntnissen aus der gesamten Gastronomiebranche.

<< Zurück