Harkening back to my days as an English major at The Citadel, I stole and wordsmithed the line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, The Ancient Mariner, “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink” which Google AI distills as “illustrating irony and the frustration of being surrounded by abundance while being unable to benefit from it” (a mariner’s thirst which cannot be quenched by the salt-laden seawater). When I entered the industry 20+ years ago and looked at the state of information (primarily provided by industry trade associations), I mistakenly thought that there was a relatively simple, quick path and adoption curve from that current state to a future state which wouldn’t be as sophisticated as the Consumer Goods world that I had lived in for 20+ years but light years ahead of the 1980’s level of knowledge that existed in 2001. As recently as 5 years ago I was told by an industry veteran charged with identifying and navigating the trends important to owner/operators that “insights isn’t even a Top 5 issue for my constituents.” Now, as a 20+ year veteran of this industry, my lived experience is that change in general comes slowly to this industry but I can say with confidence that change is coming in Pellucid’s little corner of the world which is information and insights applied to make better-informed business decisions.
Those of you tuned periodically to “the Pellucid channel” are aware of our continuing effort with the Golf Market Research Center (GMRC) to collect, enhance (with weather-adjusted measures), standardize (rounds by Pellucid facility type and revenue by 7 constant classes) and provide comparative, multi-period and KPI performance reports to subscribers. Our capabilities in this area have been greatly enhanced and accelerated via our collaboration with Metolius which is attacking the challenge from the data structure, standardization, automation and flexible visualization direction. The increased attention to information and insights is also attracting new players to (or tangent to) the space and in this issue I’m going to review two recent ones and how they’re proposing to close the current “insights gap” for owner/operators:
- 1Golf/GolfPay360 – In the recent webinar they hosted, this was outlined as the benefit of having a single tech platform for the majority of your mission-critical operations functions (tee sheet, PoS, email, mobile app etc.) that’s integrated, fairly valued (price list vs. barter) which operates as a cooperative business entity with (select) revenue sharing back to subscribers/members. The part of interest to us as “information folks” is the claims that you own your customer data and the platform isn’t trying to disintermediate you from them. As always, there are trade-offs and I’ll walk you through the ones that the Pellucid inner circle came up with pretty quickly
- ForeSeeGolf – This got our attention with an email that initially published the performance metrics, for the prior week, on Occupancy (based on tee sheet reservation levels, not incorporating any weather impact), RevPAR, Avg Daily Rate (ADR) and something called RevGen Index for 2,500+ courses spanning more than a hundred US markets. Given our long and winding path to basic KPI collection for a ~100 US courses, I was intrigued to figure out how they pulled this off, whether it was “real” or not and, even if not real, if anything useful could be gained by studying their approach and claims
These aren’t the first and won’t be the last surprise entrants into the golf information and insights space and, aided by slapping AI on to the product description and benefits, there will be promises of actionable insights. So, the challenge for industry stakeholders, and particularly owner/operators, will be to figure out whether to finally capitulate to Pellucid’s methodical, boring, rigorous, responsible path to understanding your performance and (eventually) how it compares to your competitive set or to take a flyer on one or more of the new approaches which, like weight loss, promise you amazing results with little/no effort immediately for a modest investment. 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:
- Subscribe to the Pellucid Publications Membership for $495/yr – Annual subscribers get access to the following:
- Outside the Ropes monthly digital newsletter (including this issue for starters!)
- Annual State of the Industry report portfolio (PowerPoint presentation, PDF commentary report, access to Jim/Stuart video of presentation)
- Geographic Weather Impact Tracking (US, 45 regions, 61 markets) or Cognilogic for Golf Playable Hours/Capacity Rounds for individual facilities
- National Consumer Franchise Health Scorecard (expanded data and tables underlying the annual update on the US golfer base)
- Subscribe to OtR, 12 monthly issues for $250/yr with a money-back guarantee if you’re not satisfied at any time during your subscription. Subscribers also get access to the historical archive of past issues (last two years) via the members-only section of the Pellucid website
- Subscribe to Golf Market Research Center (for operators wanting a combination of insights and action tools) – In addition to an OtR subscription (hence, this issue), you’ll get the State of the Industry presentation along with the full suite of Performance Tracking reports and weather impact services (Cognilogic for historical Golf Playable Hours/Capacity Rds, Foresight for the 60-day forecast for your facility location for Capacity Rds and daily key weather forecast variables)
As always, samples of all our publications, reports and services are available on the Reports and Services pages of the Pellucid website. Thanks for your continued support as an OtR subscriber!
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