Hello golf stakeholders:
It’s US Open weekend and I saw a funny commentary this week that said the only thing that could stop Scottie Scheffler from winning it with his momentum is the Louisville Police Dept, too funny. Assuming that everyone in Pinehurst NC is on their best behavior, on both sides of the law, it should be a great tournament at a great venue/course.
Publisher Jim K. leads this month with a summary of the ’23 Golf Consumer Base survey results sharing the fact that the golfer count continues to rise post-COVID registering its 4th consecutive annual gain. He walks you through what’s now become the standard battery of metrics for measuring the size, change and trends for the Play Rate (rds/capita/per yr, our preferred cardinal metric), Participation Rate (and golfer count) and Frequency Rate (rds/golfer/yr). He also touches on the demographic changes and which groups (gender, age, incomes) drove the upward movement as well as which golfer engagement group “won” (Casuals, Involveds or Committeds?). Lots of good news in there to continue refuting Pellucid’s reputation as the “industry contrarians” (only when the facts we have to report are negative, it’s now apparent).
Contributing Editor Stuart Lindsay takes a look at one of the trendy buzzwords in adjacent industries, “curated”, noticing that it’s now prominently and repeatedly part of the lexicon of the hospitality and travel industries. Next thing you’ll know, someone will be publishing articles on the features and benefits of curating your underwear selection but…Stuart fortunately stops well short of that. On the more serious note, he outlines that there are upsides and downsides to both service providers and consumers in this trend to increasingly leverage customer characteristics to offerings and suggests ways that golf might be able to be a more rational, even if late, participant in the party. As always, it’s a sneaky combination of humor and sage advice, check it out.
See below for the headlines to each of our recurring sections from the regional May weather impact map (pretty brutal) to Market Focus (Pinehurst NC, host of this weekend’s major). We’ve already compiled the May operations performance scorecard “preview”, courtesy of our Golf Market Research Center early-responders. It suggests that Golf Revenue and Rounds struggled but held their own against the gale-force and broad-based weather unfavorability which, if it holds up in our end-of-month numbers, will result in only a slight drop in Utilization and Golf RevpAR. That outcome would be a strong datapoint for the current trend’s resilience (available only to our GMRC subscribers). 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).
