IT for golf clubs and leisure venues: Wi-Fi, EPOS, bookings and CCTV

A golf club or leisure venue is a hospitality business, a retailer, a membership organisation and a landlord, often housed in a building that was never designed for cabling. This guide sets out what the IT should look like, from Wi-Fi that reaches the far bar to booking systems, card payments and cameras.

What clubs actually need from IT

The source of most complaints to a club secretary is the same: the Wi-Fi does not work in the function room, the card machine in the pro shop dropped out on Saturday morning, or a member could not book a tee time online. Behind those complaints sit five practical systems:

• Wi-Fi for members, guests and staff across a large and awkward building.
• EPOS and card payments in the bar, restaurant and pro shop.
• Booking, competition and membership platforms such as Intelligent Golf, ClubV1 or BRS Golf.
• Office systems for the secretary, finance and events.
• CCTV covering the car park, clubhouse and equipment stores.

Our IT for golf clubs and leisure venues page describes how we deliver this. The rest of this article is about what good looks like whoever provides it.

Wi-Fi in old buildings

Clubhouses are frequently large, spread out and built from stone or thick brick. A single router in the office covers the office. Everything else needs planning:

1. A wireless survey to find where signal dies and which walls block it.
2. Managed access points, one per area rather than one per building, all controlled from a single console.
3. Cabling where possible, mesh where not. Running a cable to every access point gives the best result, but in historic rooms a wireless mesh link between access points avoids drilling through original fabric.
4. Separate networks on the same hardware. Staff and office systems on one, EPOS on another, guest and member Wi-Fi on a third.
5. Bandwidth control on the guest network so a wedding party streaming video does not slow the bar tills.

This is the approach we took at The Hertfordshire Golf & Country Club, whose home is the 16th-century, Grade II listed Broxbournebury Mansion with walls up to a metre thick. A UniFi mesh network with access points placed room by room now covers the clubhouse, bars, kitchen and pro shop, with a separate guest network under bandwidth control. The case study has the detail.

EPOS, card payments and PCI DSS

The bar, restaurant and pro shop each have tills, and most clubs also take payments online through the booking platform. Any organisation taking card payments must meet the PCI DSS standard at the level set by its card acquirer, which for a club usually means an annual self-assessment questionnaire. The IT requirements that follow are practical:

• Card terminals and EPOS on their own network, isolated from guest Wi-Fi.
• Tills patched and running supported software, not a Windows version that went out of support years ago.
• Wired connections for tills where possible, because a card machine that loses Wi-Fi on Saturday lunchtime is a queue at the bar.
• A 4G failover so payments keep working through a broadband fault.

Most clubs link EPOS to the membership system so members can charge to their account and levy cards are handled automatically, which makes the link between the two systems another thing to monitor.

Booking, competition and membership systems

Intelligent Golf, ClubV1 and BRS Golf run tee sheets, competitions, handicaps and membership for most UK golf clubs. Leisure venues use platforms such as Gladstone or Legend for class bookings and access control. All of these are cloud services, which means three things for the club's IT:

Member data brings the club under UK GDPR like any other organisation, and the ICO's guidance for organisations applies. MFA on office and platform logins, and access limited to staff who need it, are the minimum.

Office systems and security

The club office runs on Microsoft 365, the accounts package and the membership platform, and it is subject to the same phishing and invoice fraud as any small business. Fake supplier invoices timed for the end of the month are common. The controls are the ones in the NCSC's small business guide: MFA everywhere, patched and monitored PCs, endpoint protection, email filtering and a rule that bank detail changes are confirmed by phone.

Backups need to cover Microsoft 365 as well as any local server, and clubs that still run a membership or till system on a PC in the office should treat that PC as the single point of failure it is.

CCTV and physical security

Clubs have car parks, equipment stores full of buggies and mowers, and bars with cash. Traditional CCTV installs are expensive and often run on recorders nobody can access remotely. IP cameras on the club network, recorded to a local appliance and viewable from the secretary's phone, are now the sensible default. At The Hertfordshire Golf & Country Club, UniFi Protect cameras were installed at roughly half the cost of a traditional CCTV quotation, using the same network infrastructure as the Wi-Fi.

In a listed building, camera positions and cable routes need the same care as access points, and listed building consent may be required for fixings to historic fabric. Our CCTV and physical security service covers the planning as well as the installation.

Phones

Clubs still rely on the phone for tee bookings, function enquiries and the bar. With the PSTN switch-off due by January 2027 according to Ofcom, analogue lines, including those used by lift alarms and payment terminals, need a plan. A VoIP system gives the pro shop, office and bar a single system with call routing, opening-hours messages and answering from a mobile when the office is closed.

What to do next

If the Wi-Fi fails in parts of the clubhouse, the tills and guest network share a connection, or the office PCs have not been reviewed in years, an independent review will show what to fix first. Book an IT health check and we will survey the building and report in plain English, prioritised by impact on members and revenue.