A round of golf is worth UP TO 50% MORE than just the green fee a golfer is paying to a course operator. That means a no-show or short show is 50% more financially painful for an operator. How is that? 👇
Below is an analysis we were proud to help the National Golf Foundation with:
The economics of a golf course business flows from a simple but powerful principle: every tee time represents perishable inventory that, once lost, can never be recovered. In golf, as with restaurants and other fixed-capacity businesses, this reality has two interlinked dimensions that we might consider.
First is the pure financials of unused capacity.
When a tee time goes unfilled, the facility doesn’t just lose the green fee – it loses all the revenue accompaniments that would have come with it (food, drinks, range balls, hat, glove, etc.). For the average 18-hole public facility, we estimate total revenue per occupied tee time (“RevPOTT”) to be roughly 45% above playing fees alone, which is perhaps a more significant lift than you might have guessed.
Consider, then, the impact of no-shows at golf courses. Recent analysis by an NGF Executive Member with visibility into more than 500 U.S. courses and 10 million rounds revealed a no-show rate of 9%, which would add up to about $1 billion in lost opportunity annually.[i]
The scale of the issue is significant, and so is the sensitivity. Just as a restaurant can lose 5% of its income in one dinner service from a six-person no-show,[ii] golf facilities can see their margins eroded from only a few missed tee times.
Even more striking is the extent to which lost inventory can be prevented – or at least addressed. The aforementioned analysis determined that only 11% of abandoned rounds were due to unplayable conditions, meaning most no-shows can actually be curtailed through improved policies (e.g., requiring a credit card to book a tee time), communication (e.g., automated SMS reminders), and waitlist technology.