There are an estimated three million golfers in the UK, and this year more than 100,000 of them will have booked a golfing holiday online with Your Golf Travel (YGT).
Among those will be some relieved customers of INTA Group, a rival provider of golfing breaks online, which went into administration this month. In a lightning move, YGT, founded in 2005 by two former City types, has just bought the business from the administrator.
Ross Marshall, 28, and Andrew Harding, 29, two friends who met at Durham University, set up the company with £20,000 raised on their respective credit cards after failing to interest any banks in the venture.
In due course their flexible friends provided another £10,000 and they relocated from Mr Harding’s flat in Wimbledon, South West London, to grotty offices in nearby Raynes Park. But their expansion plans coincided with the recession that hit the travel and holiday trade hard.
“There’s a lot of companies in our sector that have gone bust this year,” Mr Marshall admitted. Among those was INTA, which had been around since 1976 and had a number of brands, including 3D Golf, Bill Goff Golf Tours and Longshot Golf Holidays. The collapse of INTA left some of its customers without a holiday — even though they were covered by the usual travel industry insurance schemes and got their money back — and a number of providers of such, particularly in the Algarve, badly out of pocket. YGT has offered all INTA clients the chance to rebook their holiday at a guaranteed discount to what they originally paid.
Mr Marshall has himself spent much of the past fortnight in the Algarve, the prime destination for British golfers wanting to play abroad, with about 28 per cent of that market. He has been trying to reassure hoteliers and golf courses hit by the collapse of INTA.
“There’s a lot of upset people at the moment. They have been messed around. People are nervous about travel and travel companies,” he said. “We want to instill some confidence in them. And the Algarve has been hit very hard.”
Mr Marshall heard about the troubles at INTA, which had offices in Newcastle and Ayr, after a phone call to a colleage by one of its former directors. He paid £100,000 for the business, acquiring all the assets, technology and brands but none of the £4 million debt.
“We want to acquire customers,” he said. INTA had a database of more than 200,000 golfing clients, many of whom, he hopes, will book with his company. Its turnover, about £16 million a year, is almost exactly the projected sales for YGT in 2009, allowing it to double in size overnight.
“The first thing that came to mind is that this was a great opportunity for us. We said: ‘We’ve got to get in there quickly.’ Golf is a niche sector. We couldn’t allow anyone access to that database rather then ourselves. Getting that customer base would have cost us millions in marketing.” INTA had about 40 employees, half of whom are expected to be retained. The Newcastle office has already been closed.
Market shares are hard to assess in a fragmented industry, but Mr Marshall reckons that now he has about 40 per cent of the golf tour market in the UK. INTA was the fourth acquisition over the past year, and three of these were from the liquidators. He is in talks with another big rival but says that the price asked is still too high. “We will take them for a few more rounds yet.”
Such scale contrasts with those early days. After Durham, Mr Marshall went to work as a swaps trader at ING Barings, while Mr Harding was at Deloitte & Touche, the accountant, moving briefly to work for the London Golf Show. The two were keen golfers and soon realised that no one was providing golfing breaks online. Based on those original credit card loans, the business expanded as the two linked up with hotels and courses in the UK and overseas, although times were hard and the founders did not pay themselves a salary for the first two years. Mr Marshall says an eventual sale of the business, perhaps to one of the big travel groups, remains a possibility. “The time when you stop having fun is the time to look at offloading it.”
This autumn, in another eye-catching publicity initiative, YGT let it be known that it was seeking a full-time employee whose job would be to travel the world seeking new courses on which to play. It was sold as the best job in the world for a burnt-out or redundant banker, to work with two former City types.
The job offer duly garnered publicity, especially because the shortlist was to be winnowed down to one successful candidate by means of a golf play-off at one of the top courses. Mr Marshall insists that it is a genuine offer of a genuine job. In the event the offer, which closes at the end of this month, has attracted more than 7,000 applicants and the play-off, at the Ryder Cup course at Celtic Manor, has had to be postponed to January because of the huge response.
Mr Marshall plays off a handicap of 14, his co-founder an impressive six. “I probably get eight games a year,” Mr Marshall admitted. “I get lots of invitations to play. But my staff play quite a lot.”
