Leading Courses 2022 Revisited!

2022 was the year we learned how to travel again. Finally, we could pack our bags and head for sunny destinations to play a few rounds of golf. We continued to visit popular golfing destinations like Spain and Portugal, but we also explored quite a few new places too! We'd love to share a few funny, nice and interesting facts with you. We kick off with our community…

In 2022 more than 5,000,000 golfers visited our website to find the best course for them. Currently, more than 338,000 photos have been uploaded to Leading Courses. A picture is worth a thousand words, so we are really happy to see that you keep uploading new images! And, by the end of this year, we will have more than 335,000 reviews from fellow golfers to help you make your next golfing choice! Currently, we have a whopping 165,000 registered members on our platform. Keep sharing your reviews - even if you have reviewed the same course in the past - as new and fresh reviews are very important!

To make sharing your reviews and uploading photos easier,  we have made two great landing pages to do both which hopefully will help:

• write your review(s)
• upload your photo(s)

Almost 8,000 golf clubs were added to someone's bucket list and almost 1,000 buddy requests were sent by our members. Both are fairly new features, so we expect more and more golfers will start using and appreciating them in 2023! But it's a nice start!

We were quite surprised to see which golf clubs were added most to people's bucket list:

• Vale do Lobo
• La Cala Resort
• Quinta do Lago
• PGA Catalunya Resort
• Calanova Golf Club

You might expect to see more traditional or high-end golf clubs like Valderama, Sunningdale, Old Head, Loch Lomond, and St Andrews Links, but golfers seem to use the bucket list for clubs they really want to play in the near future and not the ones they aspire to play once in their lifetime.

Golfers conducted more than 5,800,000 million (!) searches on Leading Courses in 2022. They searched most for the following Spanish destinations:

• 🥇 Marbella
• 🥈 Mallorca
• 🥉 Malaga

2022 was the year we learned how to travel again. Finally, we could pack our bags and head for sunny destinations to play a few rounds of golf. We continued to visit popular golfing destinations like Spain and Portugal, but we also explored quite a few new places too! France and Italy grew slightly, probably because they're easy to travel to by car from Germany, the Benelux and the UK.  

1. Spain 🇪🇸
2. Portugal 🇵🇹
3. France 🇫🇷
4. Italy 🇮🇹
5. The Netherlands 🇳🇱

In 2022 we managed to grow the number of countries with bookable clubs quite a lot. Our team managed to sign almost 150 new clubs in 2022 which is a great achievement! The most promising and upcoming countries were:

• Morocco 🇲🇦
• United Arab Emirates 🇦🇪
• United Kingdom 🇬🇧

In 2022 the top 3 most booked golf courses on Leading Courses were:

In 2022 we also launched our new 'concierge service' which was a great addition to making bookings when we weren’t able to connect live and real-time with a golf club's tee sheet software. This service has been a huge success and we managed to help a lot of golfers with this new service, thanks to our amazing Customer Support team.

The most requested golf clubs via our concierge service are:

In 2022 our own team and our Ambassadors published almost 100 new blog articles! Below you can find the most-read articles in 2022 by our visitors.

• 10 best golf courses in the Algarve, author Ruben van der Zaag
• The 10 best golf courses in Alicante, author Leading Courses
• Best Golf Resorts in Europe in 2022, author Jeroen Korving

An article that always makes it to our yearly top 5 of best read articles is 'What is a Links Course''. Funnily enough, this article was read most in the week of the 150th edition of The Open on The Old Course at St Andrews Links. Probably a lot of golfers - we presume some of them new to the game and started during covid-19 - did not know what the term 'links' meant in St Andrews Links. The Old Course at St Andrews Links is an iconic course considered to be The Home of Golf.

This year we launched our 'Best Golf Resort' list quite late - in September - due to travel restrictions, airport issues and because our integration with Booking.com was not entirely finished. Normally we launch this list in February/March, just before we launch our Golfers' Choice Rankings. This is the reason why this article did not top our list of most popular articles, because in other years this has always been our most popular article.

To refresh your memory, this was the top 3 of our Best Golf Resorts 2022 list. If you want to see the whole list, visit Best Golf Resorts in Europe in 2022.

It is also interesting to see that our map view is the most popular section on our site. This is also the reason why our development team has released many new and cool improvements this year to the map view.

A few of the changes we made in 2022 to further improve our map view - aside from technical and loading improvements:

• The possibility to search in the map view
• hotels are now shown on the map (lowest zoom level), you can use the toggle to switch them on or off
• you can expand the map view
• filters have been added to drill down your prefered selection of courses
• a satellite view has been added
• you can quickly share a specific map (with filters) with friends

In 2022 we spent quite some time improving our iOS and Android app. In January we launched version 3.2.12 and we've very recently launched version 4.2.0. In 2022 we released a total of 18 updates to our app, 4 of them being major releases. If you do not have our app yet, make sure you check it out! Just download the Leading Courses app for iOS or Google Play (Android)! Note: our app is not optimised yet for iPads and tablets.

We also made many improvements to our website. Our product team works in two-weekly sprints and has completed 25 sprints this year. In total, we have released 83 (!) times this year already, so our development team has been pretty busy! We also asked them which features they were most proud of and this was their top 5!

According to our development team, they are most proud of the following top 5 features:

• New and improved tee time booking flow, including prices and availability in the calendar view
• Tee times everywhere, showing tee times near you in many different places
• Tagging golf buddies in your reviews
• Premium Membership 2.0
• New region pages

As the number of bookings grow, it is very important to keep our customers happy. Obviously, sometimes things might go wrong or go differently than expected but then our Customer Support team will try to assist the best they can. It is not always possible to help every golfer, but we will always go the extra mile. We are very proud that this approach has led to a TrustScore of 4.5 out of 5 for almost 400 customer reviews on Trustpilot.

If we are not able to connect in real-time with a golf club, as mentioned, we also have a 'concierge service' where our Customer Support team reaches out to a golf club in order to arrange a tee time for our visitor. In 2022 we started with this service and since then we handled almost 10,000 tee-time requests. Of these requests, we eventually only had to refund 800 requests because we couldn't arrange a tee time at the desired date or time interval.

To date, our Customer Support Helpdesk has received more than 16,500 tickets. The bulk - a little more than 72% - of these questions came in via e-mail. Via our Helpdesk Portal we received 23% of the tickets; the rest of the tickets came in via chat or social channels. On average we responded within 3 hours and we managed to resolve the ticket within 6 hours 💪

The busiest month of the year was October, which is the high season for golf in countries like Spain and Portugal. Some other nice and interesting Customer Support stats can be seen in the image below. Wednesday is our busiest day for incoming tickets and most tickets come in during lunchtime.

We hope you liked our first yearly overview! For us, it was a lot of fun putting this together and looking back at 2022. Our team will remain at your disposal, also during the cold and dark winter months. Remember, this is the perfect month to plan a few rounds of golf in Spain, Portugal, Italy, or Morocco! It's still the low season and the fairways are less busy and prices very reasonable!

Find your next round of golf quickly via our special 'find a tee time' page!

Finally, the whole team at Leading Courses wishes you a great Christmas and we are looking forward to helping you in 2023! Loosen up those muscles, keep grinding and most importantly, keep smiling! Even if you have a bad day on the course, it still beats any day at home or the office!