Golf resort Turnberry targets family market

While the golf market remains Turnberry’s bread and butter, since joining the company seven months ago, general manager Jordi Tarrida, has been looking at ways for the 149-bedroom 5-star Ayrshire resort, which also boasts eight self-catering apartments, a spa and 800 acres of grounds, to appeal to a wider market.

“Turnberry is known as a five-star golf resort and as a place for corporate events, so in the past there has never been any major reason for a family to come here,” he told BigHospitality.

“In the last two months we’ve added more family activities to make the resort more family friendly and have used our self-catering apartments as a place for them to stay.”

Family activities​

Some of the activities and services marketed to families include the Turnberry Farm, where children can take ‘little farmer’ tours and feed the animals and the ‘Wee Explorers’ playroom supervised by trained nursery staff where parents can leave their children for up to four hours.

Tarrida said the initial trial to attract more families was working. Trade is already 50 per cent ahead of what it was last year and so there are plans to focus more on this area in the future.

He said: “We are looking at converting some of the existing lodges into family-focused self-catering apartments and we’ll also be growing the number of family activities we offer to take it a level further.”

Golf​

Although Tarrida sees the family market as a growth area for Turnberry, he stresses it will not detract from the resort’s golfing legacy. Turnberry will host the Senior Open Championship this year and is gearing up for what it expects to be a busy event.

“We get golfers from all over the world whose dream it is to play Turnberry – that’s our summer business and will remain our focus, but in the low season with the corporate market having gone down significantly, it was a question of what can we do to increase trade during that time,” he said.

The resort is also expecting to see more interest from guests from Latin America as golf will be classed as an Olympic sport for the first time at the Rio Olympics in 2016.

"With the Olympics and Brazil there will definitely be lot of awareness and hype around the sport and as we have such a renowned course we foresee some growth from the Latin American market in the next few years," said Tarrida.

Turnberry first opened as a hotel in 1906. It was taken over by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide in 2000 then bought by the Dubai World investment company in October 2008 who closed it for a major refurbishment.

It re-opened in 2009 for the 138th Open Championship and became a member of Starwood's The Luxury Collection portfolio.