Unless you’re an avid golfer and reasonably Web savvy, you’ve probably never heard of TravelGolf.com.
For good reason. TravelGolf.com has only been around since August, and it advertises its URL sparingly, if at all. The golf travel niche isn’t enormous: One in eight travelers, or about 17.4 million adults, played golf while on an extended trip, according to the Travel Industry Association of America. Of those, less than a third would consider buying their trip online, according TravelGolf.com’s internal research.
But hidden under the site’s two-tone markup is one of the online travel industry’s most fascinating success stories. During the last four years, TravelGolf.com chief executive Robert Lewis has built a network of regional golf sites that are now feeding into the newly established flagship Web presence. His unorthodox strategy – to focus first on destinations where golfers go – is expected to yield $3 million in bookings this year and at least twice that in 2001.
“We’re building TravelGolf.com incrementally,” says Lewis, who is based in Tucson, Ariz. “We could have been one of those dot-idiots who went out and got venture capital and ended up owing 20% of their company, but look at what that would have ended us up with.”
Indeed, the volatile NASDAQ market is shutting down an unprecedented number of travel-related dotcoms and weakening countless others. Although there haven’t been any high-profile golf casualties yet, Lewis says he’s never been busier buying defunct golf-related domain names — one of his favorite pastimes as a Web entrepreneur.
How did TravelGolf.com manage to minimize its handicap when the odds weren’t in its favor? Here are a few of Lewis’ key strategies:
Nurture an inferiority complex. “The second you think you’re an expert – that you’re great – you’ve lost it,” says Lewis. That’s because the status quo changes so fast online that just when you think you understand how something works, the rules are turned upside down. Almost everything TravelGolf.com does is decidedly contrarian. When competitors were focusing on a national strategy, Lewis went regional. When they were blowing millions on ad campaigns, he built his business by swapping links and trading banner ads. He says it’s because his rivals listened to consultants who thought they “got it” – but didn’t.
Expand, expand, expand. “I want to do what I can before the big guys figure out what I’m doing,” says Lewis. But there are other reason for snatching up close to 500 domain names during the last few years, many of them golf-related. Older domains are already cataloged with the major search engines, and whoever controls them also controls a considerable amount of traffic. How much? Lewis gets 1.3 million unique visitors to the four-year-old TravelGolf.com network, of which a healthy portion comes from dead or delinquent domains. That’s about a third of the readers that Golf.com, a general-interest golf site, is estimated to receive during the same period. But considering that Lewis employs only three full-time staff and about 70 subcontractors, those numbers are impressive. They almost certainly make TravelGolf.com the leading site within the travel and golf segment.
Careful who you listen to. “Those Madison Avenue types are great at marketing a bricks-and-mortar business, but when it comes to a dot-com, they’re failures,” says Lewis. He’s learned that the Internet defies a lot of the traditional marketing concepts, which is something the old-school MBAs can’t comprehend. Instead, he’s found that the “guerilla, maverick types” who operate outside the proverbial box are the most helpful in building an online business. “When you’re hiring a consultant, the first thing you should ask is: `How much money are you making on your sites’,” he says. “If they can’t answer that question to your satisfaction, don’t hire them.”
Don’t be a dummy. “Take matters into your own hands with your site,” Lewis recommends. Ignorance isn’t bliss when it comes to the way the Internet works, he notes. Rely on your employees and consultants to study the intricacies of search engines, viral marketing and Usenets, and you might as well be lighting the figurative “dot-bomb” fuse. Rather, Lewis says a consultant’s role should be clearly and narrowly defined, with a particular goal in mind instead of a general charter to make a business “more profitable” or to ensure that it’s “number one” on all the search engines. “The better you understand the Internet, the better you’ll be able to define the role of your employees and consultants,” adds Lewis.
TravelGolf.com’s metamorphosis from a loose affiliation of regional golfing sites to one of the pre-eminent players in its niche is no accident, and its game plan has applications for the entire online travel industry. Success doesn’t necessarily come to those of us with the deepest pockets, but to the entrepreneurs who take the time to understand the medium they’re a part of.
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