How Golf Experiences Used Inntopia Commerce to Build a Successful Niche Travel Marketing Business

Today, the vast majority of hotel reservations are booked online, and so are the vast majority of daily tee times at golf courses. But in destination golf travel, almost nobody books online because it’s so complicated. We’re working with golf destinations to change that, with the help of Inntopia’s activity booking system.

We are a sales and marketing consultancy, as well as a tour operator, so our agreements with clients vary quite a bit. We can simply sell their golf packages online through our website, or we can apply our entire suite of products—we’re their e-commerce managers, we are their marketing agency, we manage relationships with lodging partners for them, and we operate their call center.

We’ve implemented the Inntopia Commerce platform on a number of different golf destination websites, including Indian Wells about 12 months ago.

Indian Wells is a great example of the challenges in this space, because it’s five different entities—four hotels and the golf courses—with five different owners. The hotels tend to treat golf as an amenity, rather than as a driver of travel. But there are definitely people who travel specifically for golf, and our clients are seeing lots of success marketing and selling directly to them.

Inntopia has helped Indian Wells do really well online compared to the industry average. And it’s due in part to the flexibility of the platform. People can start a package online, and then call in and pick right up where they left off with the help of a call center agent. Inntopia gives us the ability to structure golf and lodging packages that tie together all these different suppliers, and distribute them through all these different channels. It’s the connector.

We’ve been able to put together loads of different activity views and product searches, and apply them across all of our different distribution channels. It’s really simplified things where we used to rely on several different platforms that didn’t work together well.

And we have a great relationship with Inntopia. We talk with Kevin Duff, our account manager, almost every day about some new thing we’re trying to do. It feels like a true partnership. Inntopia lets us take a complex set of products and tie them together into simple, effective booking systems for the destination golf industry.

Danny Falero
VP Marketing and Strategic Partnerships, Golf Experiences