ASIAN GOLF INDUSTRY FEDERATION

Amata Spring’s Positive Spin on Temporary Shutdown

David Townend
David Townend

Bangkok, Thailand: Amata Spring Country Club is taking advantage of a current enforced shutdown by carrying out upgrading work on its award-winning golf course and looking to the future.

“We’d love to be open and we’d love to be operating, but that’s not possible in Thailand at the moment,” said David Townend, General Manager at Amata Spring, Founder and Managing Director of Azalea Hospitality and Vice-President of the Asian Golf Industry Federation (AGIF).

However, Townend and his team at Amata Spring are putting a positive spin on the situation that many clubs Around the region are having to endure as a result of Government edicts in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.

In the first in a series of podcasts with leading industry figures that will be broadcast on the AGIF’s revamped website in the coming weeks, Townend said: “We’re coming into Songkran (Thai New Year) and were scheduling to close the course for a couple of days to do some green and fairway verti-cutting and aeration. We’ve decided because of this opportunity of an extended shutdown to intensify that programme.

“So we’ve pretty much gone through our entire golf course with a very extensive renovation programme of verti-cutting, coring and top-dressing. We’ve also just added in a project we were looking at doing later in the year, which was the renovation of all our bunkers.

Amata Spring
Amata Spring has been undertaking bunker renovation.

“We’re installing Ecobunker and Sandtrapper in the bunkers because our golf course is now 15 years old. Over time, the bunkers erode and wash away. We had a lot of contamination in there so it was a good time for us to move that project up.

“We were also scheduled to do a re-modelling of our par-three 13th hole. However, we’ve had to postpone that project because it involved the installation of a waterfall, a creek which ran around the front of the green and we were converting a large bunker into a lake. But the waterfall and rock work expert was going to be coming from America. With all the restrictions and quarantine, it would have made it impossible to achieve, so we’ve decided to defer that project until a later date.”

For Townend, the course closure has presented a chance to carry out work that has been on the agenda since he started at Amata Spring three years ago.

“Given the need to try and improve the performance of our business, we were only able to do those works in a very small, minor scale,” he said. “So this has been a great opportunity. Normally we’d be using hollow tines of less than half-an-inch, but now we’ve been able to increase this to an inch. A lot of the problem matters we were facing and dealing with we could do in a much faster manner in this period.”

*To listen to the full interview with David Townend, please visit https://agif.asia/agif-podcast/

**Amata Spring Country Club is a Golf Course Facility Member of the Asian Golf Industry Federation. If you’d like to reach the Federation’s 10,000+ global audience via newsletter, website, Facebook and LinkedIn, become an AGIF member. For further details, please visit https://agif.asia/join-the-agif/

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