Blown off course in the quest for tourists

Mean-spirited bureaucrats have condemned golf schemes as ways round the Green Belt

Michael Kelly, Opinion, The Scotsman, 24 October 2000

What lies behind the blame culture that has developed within the embattled Scottish Tourist Board? First, it was the strong pound, then the weather and now Scotland’s 542 private golf clubs come under attack for not joining the board’s golf development strategy.

The first two I accept unreservedly. First, I blame the government for creating such a strong vibrant economy that the rest of Europe can’t handle the effect on rates of exchange.

As for the weather, that’s clearly the fault of the London-based BBC and Met Office. Scotland had a great summer. But you would not have known that from the national forecasts. England was cold and damp, and that was extended, night after summer night, to us. The number of golf games I cancelled and then had to re-arrange when I woke up to bright sunshine and blue skies! The four-star Crinan Hotel’s bookings suffered from the same syndrome.

Last year, these grossly inaccurate prognostications harmed Lord Glasgow’s brilliant little tourism business at Kelburn. The SIB should lobby for the adoption of his lordship’s sensible proposal Let tourist towns and attractions pay for their forecasts but receive punitive damages when inaccurate predictions ruin their trade. Or why doesn’t the STB organise its own weather service along the lines of French ski resorts? That would set the heather on fire.

But leave golf clubs alone. Susan Grant, the STB’s dedicated golf development officer, accuses private clubs of having an attitude problem.

"While most clubs might be full at weekends, there could be spaces between Monday and Friday for visitors to play," she says. That shows a complete misunderstanding of the whole philosophy and psychology of golf clubs. For the member over-capacity is a benefit. There is nothing more pleasant than being able to wander round to your club in the middle of the day and tee off down an empty fairway. Who wants to have to phone up the pro and beg to be squeezed in two hours later between four Japs and a couple of American women?

Most clubs do accept visitors. There are the visiting parties - normally Scots from other courses that will reciprocate the courtesy - and there are the casual visitors. Members tolerate these intruders because their green fees do moderate membership charges. But the balance is rightly towards keeping their course free for themselves. That’s the point of being in a private club. The alternative, an open-doors policy that keeps the course fully occupied, destroys the advantage.

Just look at how the visitor-orientated booking system has polluted St Andrews - difficult to get on, five-hour rounds and the majority of players non Scots. And that’s a municipal course which is supposed to be for the benefit of locals.

Sure, if you possess an internationally attractive asset, you have a duty to share it with the rest of the world, as well as a financial incentive to capitalise on it (trying telling that to Augusta, by the way). But passing round the begging bowl surely does not constitute a tourism policy. Anyway, the most important consideration here is protecting for Scots what we thought was our birthright - easy access to in-expensive rounds on world-famous courses. It’s a right that has been deeply eroded over the past few years.

Turnberry and Gleneagles are now well beyond the purse of the average Scottish golfer. You have to check with the hotel before you can play Carnoustie - although the R & A’s decision to create impossible conditions for the 1999 Open has dramatically reduced overseas demand for the Angus links. And Lyle Anderson seems determined that in future only foreign multi-millionaires who promise to play less than eighteen holes a month get admitted to the Bonnie Banks.

The answer is surely to build more courses. Ireland has done it and, as a result, is pinching our title of the home of holiday golf. Sure we’ve had some success here. The Duke of Roxburghe is doing rather well with his eponymous courses, and that aristocrat of wholesale grocers, Yacub All, is developing a pay-as-you-play links at Gailes, next to two of the best private courses in Ayrshire.

But too many proposed golfing projects have bitten the dust at the hands of planners who can’t abide the idea of a developer actually making money from the private houses he proposes to build on the periphery. Instead of seeing it as subsidising our tourist infrastructure, our mean-spirited bureaucrats have consistently condemned such schemes as cunning ways round the Green Belt.

It’s not a lack of talent at the top that has thrust the board into defensive mode. I saw Tom Buncle at work for the British Tourist Authority in California. He is a consummate professional who understands his markets. And the Lord Gordon has an enviable business track record, having created the most successful radio station in the UK But, for a media-sophisticate, his profile is low. Not that we need the garish ties of one of his predecessors, but Scottish tourism would benefit from a human face both at home and abroad.

Selling Scotland will never be easy. We are too short on world-class assets. But there are profitable niches. History, culture, wilderness, Hogmanay, Burns can all play their part. So can golf. But let’s see a determination to overcome obstacles rather than this listing of excuses. And don’t put the burden on us poor amateur golfers. We have enough problems trying to get our handicaps down.