Hello golf stakeholders:
Welcome to March, is that Spring we hear calling later this month with The Masters shortly behind it? The professional season continues through its warm-up events in warmer climes with no major storylines (get the pun?) emerging yet other than the golf media persistently insisting that LIV and the PGA TOUR need to come up with some deal because “fans want to see the best playing against each other more often.” (can we get some quantifiable evidence of that?)
Contributing Editor Stuart Lindsay leads this month with a review of the upbeat ’26 outlook for golf by parties external to the industry and the macro-economic factors driving that optimism. Despite the industry’s historical aspirations to expand the “democratization of public golf” (i.e. the golf population should reflect the general population in gender, income, age and race), it appears that the K-shaped recovery is becoming more an E-shaped recovery (affluent, mid-income, lower-income) with the top 2 tiers being flush and comfortable respectively which also aligns well with golf’s historical profile. Stuart weaves that together in his article titled Affluence, Piracy and Golf featuring Jimmy Buffett.
Publisher Jim K. plays supporting cast with his article on Pellucid/Edgehill/Metolius’ continuing progress in mining client Point-of-Sale (PoS) data to determine actionable insights via Customer Franchise Analysis. It continues to amaze us how few owner/operators that we talk to and work with don’t know how many unique customers they host annually, how many of those customers drive their business and how to communicate relevantly to retained, new and lost golfers at their property. Jim outlines what we’ve learned in working with progressive thinkers and using the Metolius data-to-cloud platform to come up with an average number of unique customers and understanding their play dynamics (average frequency and spend, number of courses in their rotation etc.) to inform their marketing and establish “dating relationships” vs. “one-night stands” for the upcoming season.
See below for the headlines to each of our recurring sections from the regional February weather impact (double-digit up, but caution) to By-the-Numbers which provides the January and Year-to-Date results for Rounds (up double-digits, both periods are the same number for Jan.) and Utilization (down as weather was actually even more favorable). We’ve already compiled the February golf operations performance scorecard “preview”, courtesy of our Golf Market Research Center (GMRC) early-responders, and the sneak peek suggests that Rounds will be up, exceeding the flat national weather, which would produce an “up” result for 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).
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 (http://www.pellucidcorp.com/news/elist) to join the discussion and healthy debate.
