Starter Kit. Idea 474 of 500. Cluster 25
Golf packages at the hill courses, priced for the Asian market
The mechanism, from the book
The country's best-known export is cricket, and little of the business around it is built at home.
The first step
Ask the secretary of a hill-country golf course for a written group rate on green fees for 4 players over 3 rounds. Combine it with a guesthouse rate and transport, price the package per player, and send it to the organisers of 3 corporate golf societies in nearby Asian cities through their public contact pages. One request for dates is the signal.
- Who pays first
- A corporate golf society in a nearby Asian city, looking for a cooler, quieter and cheaper weekend than the resorts it already knows.
- What leaves today
- The hill courses sit underused while golfers from the region spend their green fees and hotel nights at resorts in other countries.
Ask first
- Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority. Ask how a registered tour operator can sell golf packages to visitors.
- Department of the Registrar of Companies. Ask how to register a tour business that sells packages abroad.
Check before you spend
Confirm written group rates from the course, the tour operator registration, insurance for travellers, and how payment from abroad is received.
Find out these three numbers
- What group rate will the course give in writing?
- What would a golfing group pay per player for the package?
- Which golf clubs in the region would you write to first?
A comparison from the book
India. Chapter Five
"Sri Lanka needs a product for them worth staying a week for"
Visitors from the region come for short stays. A golf package gives them a reason to stay longer.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.