Many of my points have already been made, such as the fact it's a hotline to potential new members, not to mention that the club gets the list of buyers' email addresses for future marketing.
It's short-sighted to suggest that if you divide an annual membership by # of rounds you get the price below which members will be upset to see rounds sold.
For starters a winter round is not worth nearly as much -- especially in the north -- as a BST round. The members know that and I would suggest member play is far less in every British club in the winter.
Also, dividing a membership by # of rounds ignores the fact that as a member you receive a number of opportunities and benefits that the non-member misses out on.
Clubs will make decisions for reasons that might not make sense outside a committee room and so provided the management communicates the reason behind such decisions to the membership and it's acceptable to the members, it's not really for anyone else to judge.
But as for what the members see, a summer visitor round at CGC is £30. The club is ostensibly selling a winter round for £13 as a one-off special. If I'm a member, I'm not bothered by that (and wasn't when my club did a similar thing).
Cavendish also happens to be selling trial memberships of three months April-June for £100 and if you join now you get the winter for free, so the Groupon deal seems to me a smart way to get prospective buyers of that value membership through the door so they can be sold on it.
Full membership of the club is £776/year, so if I'm playing 50 rounds as a member, I'm paying £15.52 a round, making the £13 the coupon buyer pays to play in winter again not insulting in the slightest.
And with two and a half hours to go, they've sold 170 of them.
ADRIAN STIFF:The Club, Cavendish will receive £11 which they have to pay £2 Vat on thus netting £9 for the two ball from which they will supply £2 worth of tea and biscuit and around £3 buggy fuel/ wear, giving them a nett result of £2 per person. They might buy a lunch and have a beer afterwards which might give a further £2 profit.
In reality they're probably eating 20p worth of tea and biscuits between them and if the conditions allow use of a cart on the course is the petrol/electricity cost that high? In any case, we have established I think that the raw profits of selling these deals is not the only benefit for the club, or even part of the likely motivation.
If they've sold 170 of these and they get £7 per deal, they make £1,190, still nothing to sneeze at in a quiet period but if they end up getting 10 of those 340 golfers to join, that's £8,950. If they sell 20... if they sell 30... etc.
ADRIAN STIFF: In this case a big mistake is allowing the coupon to extend to March 31st, thats 5 and a half months
It doesn't. The coupon expires on March 4. A touch over four and a half months.