Greetings golf stakeholders:
Welcome to the recreational golf “new normal” edition of The Pellucid Perspective. It’s hard to believe that, here in IL, we’re completing Week 12 of COVID restrictions but the recent loosening of restrictions on carts (now allowed, single-rider), foursomes (vs. twosomes) and tightened tee time spacings of 10 minutes (vs. 15) have helped continue the April demand momentum. Our lead story this month is by Stuart Lindsay who breaks down the numbers on the revenue impact of COVID restrictions on the average course and what type of offsetting actions the average operator can consider to get back to their pre-Pandemic “baseline”. He calls it Pandemic Economics (I was lobbying hard for “Pandeconomics” but lost) and he takes you through 3 scenarios and the revenue outcomes as well as outlining, once again, why Revenue per Available Round (RevpAR) is the superior metric for explaining changes in Golf Revenue vs. using Revenue per Played Round (RevpPR, not sure how to pronounce that one). For Stuart’s crash course in economics and math, click here:
June Pellucid Perspective
In addition, our June industry romp discusses two other aspects of how the pandemic is rippling through the facility operations sector of our industry:
• Contributing Writer Harvey Silverman talks with 3 technology providers regarding how the COVID restrictions wreaked havoc with many operators’ customer touchpoints and the ensuing panic, retooling etc. that he calls the technology service tsunami. Part of this was unavoidable but he relays that the technology providers have been trying to get operators to embrace some of the customer-friendly technology for interactions pre-pandemic but they didn’t. As Rahm Emanuel once said, “Never waste a good crisis” and a plethora of operators jumped into action (all at once) after being pushed off the “touchless transactions” cliff. Let’s see where the average operator goes from here.
• Publisher Jim Koppenhaver bats cleanup with his provocative take on the Entertainment sector of golf (the media side of tournaments & broadcast rights) vs. the Recreation sector (facility owner/operators and their equipment & service providers) and asks why charity doesn’t start at home in the golf industry between those two “planets” (Jay Karen original analogy, you’ll have to read the story to figure out the connection). With nearly 25% of our public, for-profit courses running on <30 days cash reserve in the event of a total loss of revenue, there’s a critical need for “float” and it would seem the Entertainment side of the business has a few Benjamins floating around. Is this a dumb idea or just the question no one wants asked? You decide.
• Plus the monthly Industry Scorecard (the only integrated scorecard of multi-source performance indicators) including the May weather impact results (flat) and April YtD Utilization (double-digit down with COVID-depressed demand inundating the slightly down weather). We also chart the monthly timeseries for the year of Golf Playable Hours and Utilization while our Market Focus spotlight of the Top 25 US Golf Markets falls on Miami, FL the 15th healthiest market by our proprietary, multi-dimensional scorecard. Rounding out the issue, our Comings & Goings section catalogues, classifies and comments on 20 activities during the past month with Closeds and Transactions splitting the “most” honors with 8 each (but we did notch 3 Opens, there’s still life out there).
• As a reminder, Pellucid recently introduced our Cognilogic Foresight product, Golf Playable Hours/Capacity Rounds forecast 60 days out, which can be purchased here at a one-time cost of $150. As we finalize our annual subscription access and pricing, for a limited time all one-time report fees will be credited back to subscriptions.
We recognize and thank our continuing sponsors; Troon Golf, KemperSports and Golf Business Solutions for their continued support of intelligent dialogue on key industry issues and key health metrics tracking. For all those service providers and suppliers to the golf industry out there with the latest-and-greatest to offer to the industry thought-leaders who read our monthly publication, might we suggest considering joining our merry little band through our most popular 12-month sponsorship program? (offered at an improved value relative to our entry-level six month sponsorship rate) Twelve-month sponsors also receive all Pellucid industry-standard reports (State of the Industry, Outside the Ropes, Monthly Weather Impact Tracking (Nat’l, Reg’l, Markets), Top 25 US Golf Markets Scorecard, National Golf Consumer Franchise Health Scorecard and US Golf Supply on Sale report). Sponsorship provides monthly exposure to approximately 30K industry leaders and followers and associates your brand with Pellucid’s effort to expand intelligent thinking on today’s most challenging industry issues. For more “opportunistic” spenders, we might suggest one of our smaller-bite Ad Partner programs for those who may not be able to make a 6 or 12-month commitment (as short as 3 months are now available) or who may not need a half page or more exposure (quarter pages now available). If you’re interested in knowing more about sponsorship opportunities or our ad partner options, contact Publisher Jim Koppenhaver (847.808.7651, jim@pellucidcorp.com).
If you know of associates who would benefit from the topics and insights covered in this issue, feel free to forward this email and encourage them to register on the Pellucid website (www.pellucidcorp.com/news/elist) to join the conversation, discussion and debate.
We also continue to spread the word on Pellucid’s next-generation golf course database, the Internet Golf Course Database (IGDB) with partners Apparation LLC, Never-Search and GolfCourseRanking.com which now offers annual subscriptions for <$2.5K (that’s a compelling value!). IGDB now powers Pellucid’s Golf Local Market Analyzer and has added functionality to our project work like being able to tally and profile course closures within key US markets over time. For more information on our comprehensive database, updated quarterly and refreshed completely every 9 months (all 15K+ US courses), email support@theigdb.com.