Stuart and I have lately been fielding more questions about where we are in the arc of pricing power post-COVID (that’s a lot of “p’s”), whether we’re approaching (or hit) the top and what our crystal ball suggests for ’26 planning, primarily for Peak Weekend GF as most pricing revolves around that foundational figure. Pellucid veterans will recall that I’ve used the Roman god of Janus in the State of the Industry (SoI) several times, partially because it’s the start of the New Year and the month January derives its name from this god of “new beginnings” (see image above, that’s Stuart on the left and me on the right, ha, ha). We’re going to steal him here for this August treatment of the pricing topic.
True to Pellucid form, we rarely weigh in on anything based on pure opinion so I had to collect and assemble from both existing work (last year’s SoI), the ’25 update from IGDB on the Peak GF Rate for ~11K public courses (didn’t include Privates) as well as our Golf Market Research Center (GMRC) results through end July for the Discount Rate and its direction vs. ’24. Armed with those facts, in this issue we’ll cover:
- What pricing increase did we attempt to take in ’25; did it stick?
- Where does this put us on the post-COVID pricing arc vs. CPI, ahead or behind?
- Initial thoughts on ’26 strategies and range of reasonable increases
For our “superficial” readers (that’s all the Executive Summary recipients), we’re seeing that pricing power is softening so we’re going to have to dust off some of our pre-COVID practices, on both the pricing and expense sides, so we don’t overshoot the mark and significantly dampen demand inadvertently. The good news is that we’re still (slightly) behind the post-COVID cume inflationary increase so we may have a little runway in “catching up”. As I’ve said previously though, the reason you don’t want to get far behind the CPI curve early in an inflationary cycle is that consumers are more tuned to the latest year-over-year change vs. whether you haven’t previously mirrored CPI increases. For our subscribers, read on to get all the details; for everyone else, you can get the rest of the story one of three ways:
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