Hi Liam and Oliver!
Can you tell me a bit about Zest.Golf ?
Zest.Golf was formed a couple of years ago however was only officially established as a company in 2018. In short, we are a very innovative an enterprising online golf company. We provide technology solutions that we see as benefitting absolutely everyone that is involved in the golf industry.
What kind of technology do you provide?
All of our technology is designed and developed by our partner business, Lunatech, who are based out in Rotterdam. Our “launching product” so to speak is a channel manager technology. So if you think about the experience you have when you book a flight through Skyscanner or you go onto Bookings.com. Everything is available to you on one platform, hotels, flights, transport etc. Going back 15 years you would have to do that process manually or you’d potentially go into a travel agent (something I am sure you have never done before- it’s a different era).
What may surprise you is that we currently don’t have that luxury in the golf industry yet. There are a lot of golf businesses that on the surface look like they are online and you can book tee-times. But in reality it is actually quite restrictive. What we are doing is providing golf courses with the opportunity to sell their tee-times online to golfers anywhere via any channel.
How will this help to change the industry?
Tens of millions of people play golf across 6 continents- the industry is enormous! However, in the current situation there is a very limited number of websites or online mediums that people can actually book their golf through. As a result golf courses aren’t reaching potential customers. They don’t have control over the prices that their tee-times are being sold at or even their availability.
We are all about enterprising the industry and making it as open as possible. Our technology benefits everyone that is involved in the process. Whether it be a golf course who wants to sell more times. The golfer who wants who wants to be able to book golf more easily. Or a sales channels who want to enterprise their own business.
For example, if you are a golf website and right now you’re sitting there thinking, “this is great. We’ve got some nice comms channels, we’re very good on social media and have a database of 50,000 golfers”… but no one can actually book golf through your website. It’s not ideal! Whereas having our technology would allow their visitors to do just that.
Talk me through where your technology sits in the booking process?
So we don’t sell directly to the golfer. We provide the technology that connects different sales channels to one another i.e. the people who sell to the golfer and the golf course. We essentially create the technology that aggregates all of the available inventory into one place, so that all of the different providers can access that inventory in real-time and resell it to a community of customers. So Golf courses will decide to make x amount of inventory available through us- the Zest.Golf technology. We then collect all of that available tee-time data and store it in one place. Allowing anyone who wants to sell within the golf industry to access it without having to contact each individual golf course separately.
What kind of partnerships do you have within the industry?
We work very much in partnership with tee-sheet providers. So they provide golf course booking tee-sheets online. These tee-sheet providers normally have quite a strong hold over geographic markets. We have just recently established a relationship with a large company called Golf Spain and their tee-sheet provider is iMaster golf. By connecting with them we now have access to information from 130 golf courses in Spain. Our focus is very much on Europe at the moment and then naturally, working towards global domination!
We are yet to have any discussions with the US but there have been discussions in Australasia, Asia and places like that. We are still a young company and we are currently going through a crowdfunding campaign to help us grow.
What are your backgrounds, I assume you are both keen golfers?
Oliver: Yes we are both golfers. Liam is much better than I am though.
Liam: I was a pro years ago, but I wasn’t good enough to continue and ended up at university after that.
Oliver: I wanted to be a pro but I wasn’t even good enough to do that!
Liam: I also work on some other projects on my own as well. For example, I do some destination marketing in Fife. I still play golf too though, once it’s got its hooks in you that’s it
The golfing world is relatively small and that in itself is half the opportunity for Zest as well. It is such a small world and it’s quite a closed world. So it isn’t easily affected by many external things like technology coming in and disrupting it. People are quite comfortable with what they’ve got and they’re happy just living in that little world.
Oliver: It’s a bubble we are trying to burst.
Come say hi!
You can find us on the 3rd floor of the Flour Mill, or you can learn more about us on our website.
