Fairways From Heaven – “The Ultimate Golf Lifestyle”
March 11, 2011Club Leisure Group’s Golf Resorts Club
Club Leisure Group’s stable of specialised vacation clubs provides accommodation in hotels, self-catering apartments, chalets, game parks and luxury cruising…and golf. Fiona Klonarides takes a look at South Africa’s largest Vacation Club developer and discovers what makes Club Leisure Group’s high end fractional Golf Resorts Club so unique – and why it hits a hole in one.
If you want to know why South Africa is growing as a tourist destination just ask Stuart Lamont, President and CEO of the country’s leading vacation ownership specialists, Club Leisure Group.
Lamont will tell you that South Africa has the world’s largest deposits of gold, chromium, platinum and manganese; that South African Breweries is the second largest brewing company in the world (supplying China with 50% of its beer annually); and that Durban is the largest port in Africa (the ninth largest in the world). The list goes on.
Also impressive are the figures behind the company he runs, Club Leisure Group. The Pretoria-born property developer joined Club Leisure Group in 1994 and with a handpicked team driving the company’s concerted vision, CLG now has inventory in more than 150 resorts, serving 200,000 members and employing 2,500 personnel. It has offices around the globe, in London, Brussels, Zimbabwe, Mauritius, Australia’s Gold Coast and Swaziland, as well as more than 40 marketing outlets throughout Southern Africa.
The CLG story goes back to 1990. Thanks to his ability to accurately assess market trends, one of the founders of Flexi Holiday Club, Tony Ridl, was already maximising emerging market opportunities early on. Almost twenty-two years later he still plays a pivotal role in designing, developing and launching innovative products and services (in 11 different languages) to ensure CLG’s international members enjoy the highest quality holidays in quite spectacular South African destinations.
Taking the golf holiday experience to a whole new level
There are spectacular locations aplenty within the Golf Resorts Club portfolio. Clubs that resemble exclusive country estates dot the GRC website’s golf map, stretching from the Western Cape up to Limpopo. Set in endless private hectares, next to nature reserves, huge lagoons, sweeping coastlines or flanked by the Drakensberg Mountains, many of them make Europe’s more compact resorts look rather tiny.
