‘No Doubt About It’... It's The ‘Little Things’ That Breed Loyalty

Fair Comment; Winter 2025

Customer service, both good and bad, is often spoken about in golf and beyond. In our industry, good customer service is recognised and rewarded — and rightly so — often with 59club championing the cause. Loyalty, however, isn’t quite such a hot topic.

Maybe that’s understandable, because it works both ways; a symbiotic commercial relationship, if you like. And it’s not as easy to measure as customer service. But, get it wrong, and — unlike a one-off experience of a drop in customer service standards that can be rectified by further employee training — the result can be terminal, whether the perpetrator is a multi-national corporation or a small golf club. Because that comes from management and not staff on the front line.

Once somebody’s loyalty has been abused, they’re hardly likely to allow you to do it again: ‘fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me’.

I’m speaking from personal experience, here, too. My home club, in the UK, gives me a 10 per cent discount on all food and beverage purchases, to reward my loyalty. Titleist rewards players’ loyalty with a four-for-three promotion, every season, on Pro V1s, and even the golf retailer from where I purchase regularly, rewards my loyalty by giving me a discount of five per cent every time I order.

My wife and I always shop at the same supermarket, because its loyalty points can be converted to Avios points, which can be used with British Airways (BA). Similarly, we always use our American Express cards on such purchases because, again, it offers Avios points, and we have remained loyal to these brands for years because we felt ‘valued’ — the whole premise of these schemes being to engage and retain customers, and incentivise repeat purchases.

However, at the tail end of 2024, BA announced wholesale ‘improvements’ to its ‘Executive Club’, rebranding it as the ‘British Airways Club’. The marketing spin claims it’s an upgrade, but, in reality, BA has made it significantly harder for travellers to achieve ‘status’ and, therefore, receive the benefits members enjoyed previously. The difficulty in obtaining these benefits — including priority check-in, fast-track security, extra luggage and lounge access, for example — has seen many loyal BA customers adopt the ABBA attitude — and I don’t mean ‘Thank You for the Music’; it’s more ‘So Long!’.

In this case ABBA stands for ‘Anyone But British Airways’. The loss to BA of customer goodwill will be felt over time, but that’s what happens when it’s all about ‘Money, Money, Money’ (I promise that’s the last one).

In 2025, I travelled on three budget airlines new to me; I’m still here and, until now, at least, none of them has mislaid my golf clubs. I no longer have any loyalty to BA and it would take something special to entice me back.

That experience — not exclusive to me — flies in the face of the whole ‘loyalty’ concept. Management simply can’t expect customers to blindly spend money with them after removing many of the perks of a loyalty scheme. Indeed, human nature is such that once alienated, customers are likely to avoid spending with those brands in their entirety.

This situation can also be replicated at golf clubs. At my Spanish ‘home’ club a card-based loyalty scheme was recently changed to an app-based version — which makes sense — but it was dressed up as an improvement, while cutting benefits in half. Consequently, many previously loyal customers are voting with their feet, spending money elsewhere and boycotting the on-site restaurants.

One might tolerate occasional bad customer service, but, when loyalty is taken for granted, it may lead to a very messy divorce. That’s just ‘The Name of the Game’.