’26 Pricing Preview and Thoughts on Pricing Power
One of the most discussed and debated elements of our ’25 State of the Industry (SoI) presentation has been a single slide on the post-COVID pricing trend showing the change in weekend greens fees rate card vs. the Consumer Price Index (CPI) annually and summarily (’19-’25). Further reinforcing the interest in this topic and our visualization, the ’24 version of this slide appeared during the ’26 Golf Business Conference educational sessions in a Supreme Golf presentation (to my surprise, as a non-client) that I sat in on. The net takeaway is that golf is still trailing the cume CPI for the post-COVID period but we’ve closed the gap the past 2 years by taking larger increases than the moderating CPI. This generally begs the question, “What pricing should we take in ’26 and how long can we expect to be able to maintain these “super-CPI” hikes?”
In this issue we’ll touch on three dimensions of this topic:
- What does the post-COVID trendline look like on “golf fees vs. inflation”?
- What do the early indicators of ’26 Peak Weekend Greens Fees rate card pricing suggest as the average/high/low values? (informed by the sampling of our Golf Market Research Center (GMRC) participants and clients where we’re involved in their pricing strategy and exchanges)
- How does the magnitude and longevity of pricing power potentially impact course buyers paying increasingly high multiples betting on being able to substantially elevate profitability?
The good news is that we’re enjoying a period of relatively strong pricing power uninhibited by the pre-COVID challenge of excess supply but, like any industry, we do have to pay attention not to kill the golden goose and…it won’t last forever. For our subscribers, keep scrolling down to get the supporting facts and insights. For everyone else, you can get the rest of the story one of three ways:
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