Hello golf stakeholders:
We’re halfway through the 2nd highest rounds-contributing month of the year nationally (~12%, edging out June) and the final month of our Core 4 months which contribute ~48% of total year rounds. It’s been a relatively uneventful core season thus far; we’re staying on pace with ’23 (record modern-era rounds year) despite unfavorable weather so we can’t really complain.
Contributing Editor Stuart Lindsay headlines this month with something we kind of stumbled onto as a casual inquiry in the course of a client project in the “free state of CO” but could have major implications for owner operators in all states depending on how this thing plays out. The issue is ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) accessibility for websites and the potential for a legal system shakedown researching and pursuing fixes (or, more likely, just quick, mid-size settlements) for small businesses in general of which golf courses represent about 14K of them. Read inside to see what Stuart’s research uncovered and his suggestions on getting out in front of this potential “wave.”
Publisher Jim K. is supporting cast with an unusually (for him) fun piece exploring and fact-checking some of the widely-held but never-supported hypotheses about where growth in the golfer base generally comes from. He outlines 4, 2 are de-bunked, 1 is supported (but is not likely to be replicated in the near future) and 1 is a solid “maybe” (but not the scale that industry commentators have attributed to it). We’re not even going to tease you by previewing any of them here, you’re going to have to (digitally) flip the page and read it for yourself.
See below for the headlines to each of our recurring sections from the regional July weather impact map (another downer) to By-the-Numbers which provides the June and Year-to-Date results for Rounds and Utilization. We’ve already compiled the July golf operations performance scorecard “preview”, courtesy of our Golf Market Research Center early-responders. It suggests that Golf Revenue and Rounds will follow the unfavorable weather downward but it suggests that we’ll still hold or slightly gain in GRevpAR and Utilization (that’s the whole point of weather-adjusted performance tracking, “flat Utilization” tells you more about performance than “Rounds down”). If you want to know those numbers on a regular basis, you can either participate in GMRC (course operators) or sign up for a Publications Membership (everyone else).
