K Club gets into the swing of new opportunities

Hosting the Ryder Cup costs the golf club in the short term, but chief executive Michael Davern predicts it will have long-term benefits

Billboards for new housing developments around Straffan, Co Kildare, boast of a revered location and a place in history. Advertisements with epic budgets boast of a clash of the titans that the world will down tools to watch.

But inside the K Club, staff members are too busy for hyperbole.

Clipboard-wielding officials zip around on security buggies as the opening ceremony musicians rehearse, and wasps and Americans circle the hotel lobby. The men and women from BMW organise their fleet of courtesy cars.

Michael Davern, the chief executive of the K Club, is hoping for sunshine. It will be excellent PR for Ireland if the skies clear as Team USA versus Team Europe tees off, he says. "People aren't expecting Ireland to be sunny."

The Ryder Cup might be good for Irish tourism, but it will certainly be good for the K Club.

Hosting the event will cost the club in the short term - not least the European Open sponsorship offered by K Club owner and president Michael Smurfit in order to secure the event - but Smurfit has suggested that it will earn about €3 million in additional business as a result.

Davern expects this figure will be spread over the next few years.

Revenue from hotel room rates, membership fees and golf green fees from both the Palmer course, on which the Ryder Cup is being played on, and the links-style Smurfit course, will continue to swell long after the security cordon has been lifted and the golfers' girlfriends and wives have stopped dressing as a cheerleading team.

There is one problem. The Straffan House hotel at the K Club has just 69 rooms. Individually designed and lavishly decorated they might be, but 69 rooms are not enough to cope with American group business, according to Davern. "The average size of group business is 60 rooms plus and American group business is 80 rooms plus," he says. "Irish tourism is very seasonal and you need to be able to win conference business."

The K Club has applied for planning permission to extend the hotel so that it has an additional 90 rooms - an investment that will cost at least €40 million.

Davern expects that these rooms will be open for business in 2009.

That's not too late to win post-Ryder business, he says. Even if planning permission had been sought two years ago, the club couldn't have been a construction site between the fairways for this week's landmark event.

Weddings are another regular trade for the resort. "We have 40 or 50 a year and those would nearly all be residential. The Legacy Suite is big enough to hold 350 to 400 people. But all those people can't stay in the hotel."

Davern, who is 39 and a graduate of the Shannon College of Hotel Management, has been chief executive at the K Club for a year, having been poached from Sandy Lane luxury golf resort in Barbados - a venue best known for hosting Tiger Woods's wedding in 2004.

That event, which attracted the lifestyle media as well as the sports press, has more than prepared Davern for the onslaught of attention generated by the Ryder Cup.

Davern and his wife Aideen had a baby girl, Ava, while they were in Barbados and would have settled there if Smurfit hadn't persuaded him back to the K Club, where he first fell into the golf resort world in 1991.

In between his first stint at the K Club and Sandy Lane, he was at the 300-room Fancourt golf resort in South Africa for almost five years, where he presided over the security-tight hosting of the Commonwealth heads of government retreat.

Davern also prepared the venue for the 2003 Presidents Cup. That event should have been played in 2002, but as a result of the Ryder Cup's postponement following the September 11th attacks, the schedule was knocked out by a year, meaning Davern had already moved on to Sandy Lane.

The K Club has a relatively small team of 220 full-time employees, rising to 350 people for the Ryder Cup.

"It's an exciting time for us," says Davern, who seems genuinely imbued with a sense of professional and national pride. "Every single person has a massive role to play."

In total, about 5,000 people are working on the event, which is controlled by Ryder Cup Ltd, an arm of the European tour.

While the record attendance for the European Open was 30,000, the K Club expects 45,000 to 50,000 every day this weekend, with 8,500 of these in corporate hospitality.

Security is heavy, he says, because the crowds will be so much bigger and the focus will be on a comparatively small number of golfers - just 24, instead of 100.

"The infrastructure plan has to be meticulous. Let's say Tiger Woods and another American player are playing Darren Clarke and Pádraig Harrington. Most of those 50,000 people are going to want to watch that."

Although Davern speaks of the oft-mooted "billion plus" television viewers, he admits that he doesn't know where these global viewing estimates have come from. The last Ryder Cup, in 2004, did not make the top 15 most-watched sports events of the year, a list that was topped by the 153 million viewers for the European Championship final between Portugal and Greece.

In any case, one billion television viewers is advertising that Ireland could never afford, Davern says.

"Ireland is hosting the Ryder Cup for a reason - to promote tourism and to leverage more marketing opportunities for Ireland."

Ideally, this weekend's golf should have a Riverdance effect on Irish tourism, adds Davern, originally from Cashel, Co Tipperary.

He will be too busy catering for the players, their wives and the visiting dignitaries to watch much of the golf.

Anticipating a hectic winter - and having let his handicap slide - he expects it will be next spring before he gets back into the swing of playing himself.

"The Ryder Cup is just the beginning of our business."