Hospitality Strategies Deliver Clubs as Lifestyle Destinations

Design driven spaces: The Kitchens @ Kedron Wavell Services Club

Clubs are hospitality environments. That’s right, not gambling destinations but hospitality and lifestyle destinations for their members and visitors.

As Australia’s top food and hospitality consultants, Future Food work with and travel to, many of the leading Clubs in Australia who have already made food, beverage, and hospitality a central focus of their strategy. In doing so they continue to differentiate themselves in the market, providing their members and visitors with multiple reasons to engage, of which gaming is but one element.

Hospitality provides a point of difference for Clubs, if it is appropriately programmed and directed towards the needs and aspirations of the communities they serve (developing food strategies must be aligned with the membership that already exists as well as the growth potential in the surrounding catchment).

Clubs are moving to a new model that supplies their customers with a holistic entertainment solution, a tailored hospitality experience aligned to the aspirations of the target market.

Design driven spaces: Greenbank Services Club (Club Café)

GROWING MEMBERSHIP

Growth in Club membership occurs when the surrounding population aspires to engage with the Club as a component of their lifestyle. They seek to meet friends and connect with their communities. These are social spaces and a chance for people to bond through sport, common interests, and an extension of their lifestyles. They dine together, they socialise, they connect.

From a business perspective, growth in membership typically results in higher visitation, dwell time and revenue. A developed hospitality strategy allows revenue and visitation to be optimised by a third important factor, average spend which can only be enhanced with food and beverage concepts that offer a range of experiences for all club members and guests.

Adaptive positioning strategies allow a typically broad cross-section of club members to access a range of offers that subject to the size of the Club, may come from within a single menu, or from a diverse range of hospitality offers.

Modern food choices: Canton Kitchen at Bankstown Sports (Photo credit: Bankstown Sports - Instagram)

Whilst factors such as cuisine style, service overlay, price-point and design are all factors of a well thought out hospitality strategy; to become a destination dining precinct capable of attracting new members & visitors it is critical to understand your target market’s lifestyle aspirations and leverage this knowledge with socially-enabling, vibrant hospitality choices that reflect their desires.

A layer of complexity is usually added through the consideration of the competitive landscape. Most Clubs are not only competing with other clubs but also shopping centres and high streets, many of whom offer a variety of accessible, on-trend, smart-casual dining options to the public. As such, Clubs must continue to push their internal hospitality capability. They must challenge themselves to continue to learn more about what their members want and aspire to have.

Socially minded: Lucky Chengs at Bankstown Sports Club (Photo credit: Bankstown Sports - Instagram)

INTERNALLY OPERATED OR OUT-SOURCED?

This is not necessarily a binary question; In some cases, delivery of the strategy is through internal capability, in others it is outsourced to leading operators who provide the Club’s hospitality offer with a level of specialisation that the Club is unable to realise themselves. In other instances, it is a combination of the two. Understanding the best approach for a club, developing internal capability or finding the right operator is best developed through objective review of a Food Consultant.

In order for the hospitality strategy to succeed, the clearly defined operational vision must be communicated from the top of the leadership hierarchy to the new staff member starting out at a career entry level. All staff must understand the goals of the Club, appropriate to their position, in order to be engaged with and contribute to, the success of the organisation at a holistic level.

Socially minded: Dee Why RSL  (Photo credit: Dee Why RSL - Instagram)

A FORWARD-THINKING APPROACH

Hospitality success is more than the Club café. It is about ensuring that an approach is considered that looks outside the conventional benchmarks for Clubs in Australia; to the high street restaurants and shopping malls as these areas continue to push the benchmark standards higher to meet the aspirational requirements of an educated and experienced food loving target market.

Future Food knows Clubs, we understand what it takes to become a food and hospitality destination in developed competitive landscape. Talk to us to understand what forward-thinking, customer-centric, hospitality strategies look like for your Club.

Shared interests. Picasso & Pinot at Dee Why RSL  (Photo credit: Dee Why RSL – Instagram)