Yield Management In Golf Industry

Yield Management in the Golf Industry Revenue management has been addressed in many areas such as airlines and hotels to address problems in their timing and planning of pricing and overall yield management. So why hasn’t this similar practice come to the golf industry? The golf industry has a lot of similarities to the hotel and airline operations and should start to apply some of their yield management techniques to their everyday operations. First we will want to look at what exactly revenue management is. Revenue management is defined as the application of information systems and pricing strategies to allocate the right capacity to the right customer at the right place and the right time. In general it is letting customers find …show more content…
When looking at tee times, you notice that the demand for them is highly variable. In most cases you can count on demand being higher on the weekends in the summer and at a particular time of the day. Managers must be able to predict those high demand times and low demand times in order to effectively price the tee times. A golf course needs to able to determine how long each group is going to play as well, which links to how hotels use their previous knowledge to determine if a customer is going to stay for an extra night. If managers are able to predict the amount of time a certain group of golfers is going to take, they can more efficiently fill their tee sheets and maximize revenue. Managers that want to become more efficient in their revenue management tactics must control the overall length of time that golfers take to play a round. They can start by reducing the amount of no shows that a golf course experiences, you must look at the definition of duration, try and decrease the uncertainty of duration or reduce the interval of tee times. A golf course manager must look at selling round of golf as selling a certain amount of time that the golfer will be on your golf course. You must be able to differentiate between different groups of golfers (twosome, threesome, foursome, teenager, senior) in order to properly space out your tee times. You must also look at the different times that people golf and see if the average time for a round changes from the morning hours as opposed to the afternoon. Even with all of these strategys in place, it can still be hard to find a consistent average length for a round because of the many different types of golfers that can golf together. To help with this problem you must be able to look at other management efforts to try and make duration more