February Golf Weather Impact:
+30%, 2nd month in a row!
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February brought a positive sequel to January's sharp uptick featuring a 32% gain in Golf Playable Hours (GPH) at the national level vs. Year Ago (YA). That basically holds the gains from January and posting a result of +31% for the Year-to-Date (YtD). Regional breadth continued to be balanced at 1:1 with 9 regions with favorable weather "comps" and 8 unfavorable (the out-of-season or neutral zone regions of +/- 2% represented the remaining 28 regions). Looking at YtD weather impact performance by day-of-week, weather favorability was overwhelmingly concentrated in weekdays vs. weekends representing a slight headwind within the positive results. This begs the question, "How much of this favorability will hold for the balance of the year?" Pellucid subscribers have access each month to our forecast for '17 year-end GPH for Total US, the comparison to the 10-year average, the regional breadth details and the day-of-week breakdowns via the Geographic Weather Impact Tracking report or Pellucid Publications suite through the Client Login section at the Pellucid website. Cognilogic facility weather impact subscribers also know these figures for their individual facility (go to www.pellucidcorp.com to subscribe or register for more information and in exchange we’ll send you a sample of the '16 1st half actual results to review).
Rounds demand data for January as published by Golf Datatech revealed an expected, but slightly underwhelming, lift of +5%. Comparing that result to Pellucid's previously-reported GPH results, we had a significant drop in Utilization when comparing that 5% gain to the +31% GPH result for the opening month of the year. Given that these are January results, the YtD figures are the same as the month. Utilization figures for the month at the National and 61 key Markets (including Pellucid's designated Top 25 markets) level are also available to Pellucid Publications members and Geographic Weather Impact report subscribers.
Jim Koppenhaver comments, "In many parts of the country, the '16-'17 winter will be remembered as "the winter that wasn't." Stuart Lindsay and I were discussing recently whether this was as good as the similar pattern we saw back in '12 and that will make an interesting analysis at some point in the near future. Regardless, years where you can play golf north of the Mason Dixon line in January or February are few and far between. Interestingly though, while the national picture is way up, the current picture is one of two stories as the West Coast is having a very poor weather start to their year. This is one of the reasons we developed Weather Impact Tracking from facility level aggregating to regions aggregating to national. If you saw the map which we produce monthly, you'd see nothing but a sea of red west of the Rockies through February compared to '16. It's also instructive that the vast majority of GPH favorability is concentrated on weekdays so that's also going to depress our upside for "bluebird" rounds for the vast majority of the golf population (except the retirees, God bless 'em). That said, we'll take the +5% rounds results for January even though that represents a double-digit Utilization drop; it's not uncommon in off-season geographies that we're not going to capture even half the upside so I'm not panicking on that front. At the 61 market level and focusing on our Top 25 (in-season) markets for YtD Utilization, we see Seattle as the top performer in Utilization gain (demand beating horrendous weather "comps") while Atlanta has the biggest Utilization deficit. This is a great "teaching moment" for the importance of knowing Utilization; Atlanta is up in rounds while Seattle is down, so just looking at rounds doesn't indicate operational proficiency. The market breadth across the 34 in-season market universe is negative for January at 2:1. As always, the national picture is a "mosaic" of markets and regions so while it's helpful to know how weather treated us at a national aggregate; you have to also understand whether that's uniformly good, bad or offsetting winners and losers. Our clients do."
A broader and more detailed scorecard of the monthly key industry metrics can be found in Pellucid’s free digital magazine, The Pellucid Perspective. To register to get the current and future editions, go to www.pellucidcorp.com/news/elist, fill in the information and you'll be registered for the next edition on 3/15/17.
Intelligent, curious and courageous industry stakeholders wanting the detailed metrics and monthly updates on weather impact at the national, regional and market level as well as utilization and the full year forecast numbers have two subscription options:
For individual facility owner/operators who need facility-level history, current year results by month and day-of-week and full year forecast data, Pellucid/Edgehill’s self-serve, web-delivered, real-time weather impact service product, Cognilogic, is your answer. It’s available for $240 for the year-end report and unlimited annual access via the Cognilogic web portal or $120 for a single year-end report. For more information, contact Stuart Lindsay of Edgehill Golf Advisors (edgehillgolf@msn.com) or click here Order Cognilogic.
You can order any of the above information services via Pellucid's Online Store
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