From Golf Resorts to Waterparks: Add an Experience that Fits Every Hotel Concept

Above: Sam’s Bar & Kitchen at The Belfry is a popular, relaxed social gaming spot featuring shuffleboard, interactive darts, gourmet burgers, big-screen live sports and more.

Hotels have always competed on rooms, restaurants and facilities. The ones pulling ahead are now competing on what guests do with their evenings.

A hotel stay is, by design, a contained social experience. Guests arrive together, eat together, and share a space for the duration of their visit. The conditions for genuine connection are already there. What most hotels haven’t fully addressed is what happens in the hours between dinner and bed – the window when guests drift back to their rooms, pick up their phones, and the shared experience quietly ends.

Social gaming changes that equation. Not by adding an amenity to a list, but by giving guests a reason to stay in the same room, competing, laughing and spending time together in a way that a spa menu or a hotel bar rarely achieves on its own.

The hotel operators recognising this earliest are finding that social gaming is the perfect extension to what they already offer.

After the Round: The Belfry.

At The Belfry – one of the UK’s most recognised golf resorts – FLYBY Darts and SHUFL sit within Sam’s Bar & Kitchen, positioned as the natural continuation of a day on the course. The competitive instinct that drives a round of golf translates directly to a game of FLYBY or SHUFL. The same group of guests who spent the day keeping score on the fairway find themselves doing exactly the same thing at the oche – with drinks in hand and nowhere they need to be.

That continuity matters commercially. It keeps guests on-site longer, extends bar spend into the evening, and turns what might have been a quiet post-dinner hour into one of the most social parts of the stay. For a resort built around shared sporting experiences, the fit is natural.

Image caption: Quality Hotel The Reef in Frederikshavn Denmark offers a tropical water park with an 80-yard slide, various pools, saunas, spas and a gaming area with Social Games – fun for all ages.

After the Waterpark: Quality Hotel The Reef.

At Quality Hotel The Reef in Frederikshavn – a Strawberry Hotels property built around family stays, with a tropical waterpark at its centre – the brief is different but the logic is the same. Families with children of different ages need something to do together once the pools close for the evening. The hotel’s dedicated Social Lounge, featuring shuffleboard, gives them exactly that: a shared space where a family of four or a group of colleagues can compete on equal terms, regardless of age or ability.

The Social Lounge sits open to all guests throughout the evening – no booking required, no age restrictions on the game itself. That accessibility is part of the point. Social gaming at its best is genuinely inclusive, which makes it a particularly strong fit for a family hotel where the guest mix spans generations.

A growing footprint.

The Belfry and The Reef represent two ends of the hotel spectrum – luxury golf resort and family destination – and social gaming is working in both. You’ll also find it at Strawberry’s Quality Airport Hotel Gardermoen in Norway, with Quality Hotel Grand Larvik, also in Norway, currently in installation.

The common thread across all four isn’t hotel category or guest profile. It’s the recognition that the most memorable part of a hotel stay is rarely a room or a meal, but a moment shared with the people you came with. Social gaming creates those moments, reliably, night after night.

The Social Gaming Group supplies, installs, and supports social gaming experiences in hotels across the UK and Europe – from standalone game installations to fully branded social zones.

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