The Pellikaan Story Pellikaan was the fi rst company to bring the full health club offer to Holland 20 years ago
very into sports, so when his football career ended and he launched his construction company, he focused heavily on building sports facilities for the local councils – swimming pools, sports halls and so on. “Then, 36 years ago, he started his own multi-functional
“T
tennis centre – a concept he’d seen in the US. He built and operated the facility and the model proved a success in the Dutch market, so he built more – not only in Holland, but also in Germany and Belgium, where he also had construction companies. “The clubs attracted all the top tennis players: David
Lloyd, for example, played for my grandfather’s fi rst team in the Netherlands. In fact, it was this experience that encouraged David to go back to the UK and build a tennis club just like my grandfather’s. At the time we didn’t have a construction company in the UK, so we didn’t build the fi rst ever David Lloyd club, but we built the second and still build a lot of their facilities for them now. “In the end, my grandfather operated three facilities of
his own – big tennis clubs with indoor courts, squash, a restaurant – which at the time were unique in Holland. Of course, the product has evolved a lot since then to become
April 2013 © Cybertrek 2013
he Pellikaan business began with my grandfather,” says Dennis Pellikaan. “He used to play for the Dutch football team and was
the full-service health club offering we have nowadays, but that’s how it all started 36 years ago.” He continues: “My grandfather continued to run the
clubs when he retired. Meanwhile my father took over the construction business, building clubs for the likes of David Lloyd Leisure in the UK. My father soon realised the tennis club model wasn’t really evolving any more, so he decided to introduce to Holland the model he’d seen working in the UK: the full health club offering with a monthly membership. The fi rst such facility opened in Amersfoort 20 years ago. It still had indoor and outdoor tennis, as well as squash, but now it also had 1,000sq m of fi tness, two aerobics studios, a swimming pool, sauna and so on. “Fast-forward to today and we now have seven clubs in the
Netherlands: six branded as Club Pellikaan, with a seventh – an older-style tennis club – due to be overhauled and rebranded as a Club Pellikaan in the next couple of years. We had wanted to do it sooner, but the economic crisis delayed the project. For now, we’ve created a budget gym on-site, so there is at least a fi tness offering.” Pellikaan concludes: “There continues to be great synergy
between the construction company and the health club business, because both parties have the same expertise in operations. The construction people understand how the clubs work and the whole co-operative relationship works very well.”
Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital 33
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