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.
