Hello golf stakeholders:
As a lead-in to our final issue of the year (our 16th in publication), we want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a fun (and safe) celebration to ring in the New Year when it arrives. Before you know it, it will be time for the ’26 PGA Show and our 23rdconsecutive annual presentation of the SoI (working date/time is Thu 1/22, 1:30-3PM EST but not yet confirmed). Stuart and Jim have also been invited to do the abbreviated preview of that at the Golf Business Conference educational sessions on Tue 1/20, 11-11:50AM for those of you attending.
Publisher Jim K. has the lead story for the last month looking at the role reversal of the ascendency of digital golf (simulators, both on-course and stand-alones, and digital range makeovers) compared to the fading fascination with golfertainment (Topgolf and clones). You likely won’t be able to miss his schadenfreude as he and Stuart have been saying for over a decade that golfertainment isn’t accretive to owner/operators, consumer equipment manufacturers or the majority of the legacy golf industry so its previous success was just creating a parallel entertainment industry (not a bad thing in and of itself for their investors and cheerleaders). As he outlines in his article, the advantages of digital golf are that it’s largely on-premise which brings golfers to courses and reinforces the sport of golf via skill development, shotmaking, strategy etc. which has a much more likely chance of creating new golfers and getting existing golfers to play more. Any of our readers interested in any of those benefits not delivered by Topgolf? We thought so…
Contributing Editor Stuart Lindsay, as he historically has, teases a few of his SoI topics regarding where the industry might be headed in ’26 and the influences of AI, price/value, technology changes and what we’re seeing in a slight softening of the Key Performance Indicators coming out of the ’25 season. He returns to beating a drum that we’ve been banging for 10+ years which is the fact that Customer Franchise Analysis and acting on those insights is a key to success in ’26 (starting with much dramatically improving golfer retention). The challenge is that much of that is locked up in your PoS system but the technology tools as well as techniques and measures that we’ve pioneered and refined over the years are getting much closer to the automated nirvana which seems to be required for our industry to act.
See below for the headlines to each of our recurring sections from the regional November weather impact (another single-digits downer, ouch) to By-the-Numbers which provides the October and Year-to-Date results for Rounds (month down/YtD slight up) and Utilization (both up). We’ve already compiled the November golf operations performance scorecard “preview”, courtesy of our Golf Market Research Center (GMRC) early-responders, and the sneak peek suggests that Rounds might have actually been flat which would produce a surprising healthy up in Utilization. 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).
