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By Rob Carey
Off-the-beaten-path Angel Fire Resort & Country Club has a short but intense golf season that requires both preparation and adaptation
Set in the mountains of northern New Mexico, Angel Fire Resort & Country Club boasts one of the most scenic locations in America, providing a four-season playground for both the well-heeled (it’s 25 miles from Taos and 90 miles from Santa Fe) and more modest folks alike. But at 8,600 feet above sea level, the 18-hole layout plus the practice areas at the country club pose numerous challenges to Don Willingham, a 36-year industry veteran who has been director of golf there for the past four years.
Let’s start with the demand curve. The course hosts approximately 19,000 rounds per year, but more than 15,000 of those happen within a 90-day window. “The course is open late May through late October, but mid-June to mid-September gets 200 rounds a day—it’s just a blur,” Willingham says.
About two-thirds of the total rounds come from the 750 golf members who own a condo or home in the Angel Fire community, and until this past year the remaining rounds came from guests of the 157-room lodge and those renting owners’ units. But in May 2015, the resort opened a 102-spot RV resort, with plans to expand to 350 spots in the next few years. Willingham is looking to drive not just rounds from this customer segment, but to drive future property purchases and memberships, too.
“The RV resort is not a typical RV park,” Willingham explains. “It offers so much in terms of comfort, convenience and activities. That’s necessary because the demographic of people traveling the country in RVs is really high. They fit our resort’s profile, and once they’re done with RV travel, they’ll probably live in a place they visited and fell in love with.” To lure those potential members, Willingham has developed a stay-and-play package for RV resort guests so they are exposed to not only the golf product but also to the warm, service-oriented atmosphere he has developed throughout the club.
Creating such an environment at a short-season operation isn’t easy, given the labor pool that’s generally available. To compensate for that as well as for the brief training period before the summer slam begins (for which there’s a detailed service-training manual that Willingham developed with the human resources department), he turns to the residents of the Angel Fire community to round out his staff.
“Most of our outside positions are filled by retired businesspeople from a variety of backgrounds, who make great front-line representatives,” Willingham says. “They’re working here because they enjoy the interaction, and the service they provide is instinctive because of their experience.” What’s more, the younger staff members learn the subtleties of memorable service by observing their older colleagues as they engage and assist customers. In winter, many of the veteran staffers also work inside the pro shop when it transitions to a Nordic ski center.
Understanding that most of the resort and home-rental guests are families, Willingham develops stay-and-play packages that bundle other activities as well, including fishing and zip-line rides. And in 2015, he created a youth program that seems to have hit the mark. As a result, the daily schedule for Angel Fire’s five-day camps includes not only golf instruction but also tennis, basketball, fishing, hiking and zip-lining.
“We realized that we can attract a lot of kids to golf who would not come for a straight clinic,” Willingham notes. “The most important thing is that they’re having a great time. For kids between nine and 14 years old, that means variety. They’re fascinated by the view from the top of a mountain, and they love standing in the stream to fish. And now we have a chance to turn all these kids into golfers, too.”
To drive more golf demand from grown-ups, Willingham participates in regional golf shows in Albuquerque and several cities in Texas and Oklahoma. But he also spends considerable time on planning a “royal member-guest” event each year designed to make a strong impact on participating visitors. Angel Fire didn’t have a member-guest for a few years before Willingham arrived, which was a missed opportunity. After four years of doing it, though, “we now get 40 teams from 20 states, which is great because it exposes our resort not just to the guests but to their social circles back home.”
On the public relations front, Willingham works to gain recognition from regional media outlets and the general public, an effort that was bolstered by an open-registration “million-dollar hole-in-one” outing he debuted in 2014. Held during the first week after prime season, the scramble event is followed by a seated lunch alongside the 16th hole, a par-3 with a 200-foot elevation drop from tee to green. Each player gets to hit, and the three who are closest to the pin get a second shot to make an ace and collect the big prize. The event drew more than 100 players in 2014 and 2015, as well as valuable media coverage.
As the season winds down each October, Willingham and superintendent Joe Distefano still have a lot of work in front of them. “At that elevation, maintaining the greens in season is tough,” Willingham says. “But keeping them from getting wrecked during a cold, windy winter with little snow cover is really tough. You have to properly protect the bentgrass greens with the right chemical types and amounts for keeping away snow mold.”
Meanwhile, the bluegrass fairways and rough also must be protected, but from a different intruder. “It’s a hardy strain that has almost no winter kill, so the migrating elk love to eat it,” Willingham says. And while the wildlife viewing at Angel Fire is an asset to the golf experience, late-season rounds can become a little hairy. “We have three holes that have consistent footprint damage each morning starting in late September, and we sometimes get phone calls from players about calves wandering onto tee boxes,” with their protective mothers not far behind. Once the season ends, Distefano must rope off at least seven greens to keep them from being trampled in winter. “I’ve worked at a lot of places,” says Willingham, “but a few of the things we deal with at Angel Fire were new to me.”
Then again, some things aren’t: like the holistic approach to operations that keeps the facility humming along.
Rob Carey is a freelance writer and principal of Meetings & Hospitality Insight.