“The golfer can go to another destination if he doesn’t get the right treatment here.”
The president of Villa Padierna Hotels & Resorts is a thoughtful person who gives a calm rhythm to his speech. Ricardo Arranz de Miguel, always with an inquiring mind, unravels in this interview his ideas on how, in his opinion, the golf business should be on the Costa del Sol.
And if there is something that defines this elegant Burgos born in Aranda de Duero in the middle of the last century, it is that he does not bite his tongue.
“I think we have to recover the Marbella brand again,” he says point-blank. And he explains: “At the time when we held the Ryder Cup, we had the idea of creating the Costa del Golf brand, which afterwards -neither by the Administration nor by private initiative- we have not known how to promote and sell it, and I now believe that as the Costa del Sol or Costa del Golf are not uniform, we should start creating specialized brands”.
“Back in the day,” he continues, “when I arrived in Malaga as a student (he studied economics), I remember that Torremolinos was an absolutely important brand, even more than the Marbella brand, but we died of success and sank it.”
Arranz is convinced that the most important tourist brand in Andalusia is Marbella, “and as a copy of Marbella, brands should be created or developed in the surrounding area and especially in the competing provinces of Marbella such as Cadiz, Granada or Almeria”.
In his opinion, a study should be carried out “to create new brands that are destination brands”.
“Having said that,” continues the president of Villa Padierna Hotels and Resorts, “due to the circumstances that the world is currently experiencing from the point of view of tourism and also the golf business, Andalusia is the most important destination in Europe because it currently has something that we have never had before: an impressive quality of infrastructure.”
In this sense, he mentions, among others, Malaga airport, “which is in a predisposition to grow more than twice, when before it was the other way around and we had more passengers than we could receive”, and the highways and freeways, “which communicate in a very comfortable way all the golf courses”. For Arranz, among “our great strengths”, the first is the climate; the second, safety, and the third, infrastructure.
Against these positive aspects, he points out the “quite problematic” weaknesses of this tourist destination. “Focusing on the world of golf,” he says, “I think we have been unable to create a truly golf destination, a category destination, a golf destination as if it were a ski destination, where the client who comes can have access in a clear way to different circuits.”
“Initially,” he continues, “it was a success that all the courses – including the ones I did – we designed them to be sold on a per share basis; and that has perhaps been what has given us the lack of vision to create these much more commercialized golf destinations.”
In his opinion, “we have lacked perhaps two important things: on the one hand, professionals in marketing and sales to do so, and on the other hand, and above all, a quality of service to be able to attract and give this security to the category customer who visits us”.
According to Arranz, “we have become accustomed to the fact that the fields have been built by a developer, the vast majority have been built to create more value in that land, in that urbanization, and thus be able to sell the real estate assets better, but in the end these developers have disappeared and -which was logical and normal- some boards have arrived with their presidents and managers whose task in some way is to serve this board of partners”.
“The big mistake,” he believes, “is that we have not been able to get the courses to create a marketing, a commercialization, together with the Administration and private initiative, so that we are a destination of category or quality golf.”
-If it were up to you, what would you do to better promote the destination and attract more golfers with higher purchasing power?
-It is a reflection that we all have to make together. Perhaps the problem is for those of us who are one hundred percent owners of golf courses, which represent two or three percent of what we have here. What I ask is that the vast majority of the other courses feel the need to create a medium-high level clientele, which is really what we have in Europe. We are always boasting that we are a destination with many golf courses, and if you go to countries like Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy or northern Europe, we see that they have many more golf courses closed than we have open. Germany has almost a thousand golf courses, eighty percent developed in the last twenty years, with between 1,500 and 2,000 members and where a membership share costs about 200,000 euros, that is, it is a priority clientele for us. And above all, the vast majority of the winter, the fields are closed because of the snow and the terrible cold. So we have not been able to attract this clientele. I remember going to Germany, near Munich, to one of the most important schools in Europe, which had seven golf courses to learn to play, and in the practice area, the balls went into the snow, and there were more than a hundred teachers.
If this has been developed in Germany, we, who have all the conditions, have not known how to do it, we have not known how to have good international golf academies here, for seniors, for ladies, for children. We lack some private initiative or public initiative. That is the constructive criticism I want to make. Up to now, what we have done is like real estate: we have sold bread. People came, we sold, we raised prices… and I think the future lies in knowing how to sell bread, that is, knowing how to do marketing, knowing how to communicate, and attracting the medium-high clientele, which in some way will be the one that will give us continuity and deseasonalization in the golf business.
-The problem is precisely to find the magic formula to attract them?
-The magic formula is work. It would be necessary to do as in the Dolomites with skiing, which went from being a remote and unknown place to create 1,200 kilometers of ski slopes and an industry that now attracts a large part of Europe to ski there. And also giving it tremendous facilities, being a protected destination from the environmental point of view. But the Italians have reacted and have done so, and it has gone from being the most depressed area in Italy to being at the moment the most important region in terms of income and per capita income in the country.
We could copy all that in the world of golf because we have the clientele in Europe, in the United Kingdom alone there are more than 1,500 golf courses, we have the clientele in the Middle East, because we are going to have one or two daily flights from Doha or Dubai to Malaga. And in the Emirates there are many expatriates with a very high economic level and there are quite a few golf courses where they play regularly and where, contrary to what happens in central and northern Europe, there the courses are closed in summer because it is 45 or 50 degrees. And here we can offer them climate, security and communications.
But something is missing, I insist: professionalism in terms of marketing and image development, and above all, we are also lacking professionalism in service and good customer care. It is not acceptable that in Portugal, in Morocco and in the United States, if you want to play golf in one of the thousands of golf courses there, they demand not only that you take a golf cart with your green fee, but also that you must take a caddie. Because the caddie is not a man who carries your bag with him, who now goes in the golf cart, but is someone who will help you in your game with his instructions. Why is it that in the place where we have the highest unemployment in Europe there is no caddie school or caddies do not already exist? Because we are self-conscious, because we do not know this reality, we do not know that all the legendary Spanish players started as caddies. Why should we be ashamed of that if the United States, Portugal or Morocco are not ashamed of it?
-And do you think there would be a demand for caddies here?
-If we have a medium-high level clientele and we already know that in those destinations, which are not cheaper than ours, it works, why won’t it work here, when it has already worked for us and when we have huge unemployment? This is something that we should analyze in depth. I think we have to offer the client a personalized service, attending to the demands that each person requires. Going back to the Dolomites, if I want to ski on certain slopes, the hotel provides me with the transfer there at no additional cost. Here we have to create the mentality in the camps, including those of members, that the clientele must be treated with the utmost attention. And we must always bear in mind that the client, especially if he/she is of medium and high economic level, may go to another destination if he/she does not receive the adequate treatment here.
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