There are two large signs at the main entrance to The Grove featuring an image of Luke Donald and proclaiming the tour is coming to town.

It may be just over two weeks to go until many of Europe’s leading professionals arrive in Watford to play in the British Masters but preparations are reaching an advanced stage to turn the hotel and golf complex into the venue for the biggest stand-alone sporting event to be staged in the area for a decade.

The Grove’s director of golf and resort experiences Anna Darnell has been involved in all aspects of planning for the European Tour event, which is supported by Sky Sports and will be hosted by the Hemel Hempstead-born former world number one, and she is pleased with how arrangements are progressing.

“The build schedule started towards the back end of August, beginning of September,” Anna explained on Monday. “It takes about five to six weeks to get everything done for the tournament, but at present we’re on track, which is great.

“We had a little bit of a hiccup on Friday with the storms and the flooding so we had to delay on that day, but everything is still absolutely fine.

“There’s been quite minimal disruption for the golfers as well. Most of the work that has been happening so far has been on what we call our presentation lawn, which just sits alongside tournament [hole] 18.

“Soon to be going up will be the grandstands, the TV towers, our public catering, retail tents and the big tented village hub will be added on to that.

“I think as far as the hotel is concerned, all key members of the senior team are involved and on board with what is happening and they’re briefed on the build-up.

“It’s such a huge property here, communication for us is the biggest thing, making sure everybody who works here is fully up to speed with what is happening in each of their areas.”

As well as ensuring all the tournament infrastructure is ready in time, The Grove’s staff have also been busy readying the course for Donald, fellow British Masters ambassadors Justin Rose and Lee Westwood, and the rest of a high-class field which it is hoped will include the majority of Europe’s Ryder Cup team who will be seeking a fourth successive triumph over the USA at Hazeltine next week.

While much of the more substantive tournament preparatory work was undertaken during the winter in terms of drainage and lining the bunkers, the short game area at the Chandler’s Cross resort is now closed to golfers, mats are in use on the driving range, the back tees are being protected and golf carts will soon be taken off the fairways.

Although Anna is able to draw upon the experiences of being involved with previous tour events – she undertook her PGA professional training at former Scottish Open venue Loch Lomond and was already working at The Grove when it hosted the 2006 World Golf Championships, American Express Championship – every tournament throws up particular challenges. And one of the biggest has been cars. Or more specifically, where to put them.

Asked about any problems or surprises that have been encountered in preparation, she explained: “It’s been more about all the different types of guests we’re going to have on site during the event and what we’re doing to host them but still continuing with the service we would want to offer and people expect of us.

“One of the biggest things for us is car parking. We don’t have a huge car park here and we’ve got 15,000 to 20,000 spectators here per day, we’ve got hospitality on top of that, we will have resident bookings – not only the players who are staying – you’ve got to allocate areas for the TV compound, we’ve got media who will want to be close to the action so there’s a number of different elements and challenges that were involved around that.

“We looked at the amount of people roughly per guest type, where they would expect to be parking with the type of package they have and started to allocate the spaces that way.

“I think we’ve used areas we never knew we could use for that type of thing, but again very heavily involved with the Tour and communication on what we could and couldn’t do.

“We’ve had to work extremely closely together on that because they’re used to doing this on a weekly basis but every property is completely different and ours is such a huge property with the types of things we do here. It’s kind of them understanding all of the different people we’ve also got to make sure are still looked after.”

Another indicator of the scale of hosting a major golf event is that 50 volunteers have been recruited to help with course maintenance alone during tournament week and Anna freely admitted ‘we couldn’t do it without people’s help’.

“We’ve got 77 course maintenance guys in total including our own full timers that we’ll have working in tournament week,” she continued. “Again it’s a big challenge. We have to sit down, brief all these guys, train them up so they know exactly how we want to manage the course over that period, the same as golf operations.

“We’ve got some volunteers that are coming in to help with locker rooms, the driving range, so it’s making sure the week before we’ve got everyone briefed, they know what they’re doing and everything should then be as seamless as it normally is.”