Golf's Data Revolution

Hello and welcome to the Revenue Alert newsletter series, presented by Noteefy!

Here we summarize the best ideas, strategies, and insights in the world of golf course operations and revenue management. If you are looking for fresh tactics from some of the industry’s best leaders to grow your course or portfolio’s profitability, this is for you.

Today’s topic: Ross Liggett, founder of Metolius Golf, provides his take on Noteefy’s latest insights article, The Golf Data Revolution.

Metolius Golf was founded on a simple premise: Golf courses and private clubs generate mountains of valuable data, but operators don’t have the tools to use it efficiently.

There are many reasons for this, from antiquated systems to a lack of time. Over the last year, the explosion of AI tools has only amplified the need for golf owners and operators to have access to clean, organized historical data.

Many systems are adding AI features and chat assistants. These are a natural progression of existing data features: we started with static reports, progressed to business intelligence dashboards, and are now moving to AI agents. While agents are great and helpful, they are still connected to the same underlying source data. They do not solve the problem of disparate data because they only connect to one system.

The real solution is to organize disparate data around a common spine, so that operators can understand what’s happening. It is not enough to know that Saturdays are going well and Tuesdays are not. We need to know why these days are different, by understanding our customers, how they engaged with the course brand, how they booked, what communication and price point drove them to action, and what their loyalty looks like after the fact. This data is sourced from dozens of systems. 

If we look beyond our industry, we can find many examples of proven strategies to solve this problem. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel!

The hotel and airline industries got a head start on this, and the decisions that they made in the 1980s and 1990s are still paying dividends today. Hotels and airlines know their customers' preferences, demand, pricing tendencies, and booking patterns because this information is consolidated and shared across properties.

This gives revenue managers in the hotel and airline industry the ability to focus on making decisions instead of consolidating and analyzing data. The impacts of this strategy extend far beyond setting prices and determining communication cadence.

At Noteefy, we are on a mission to solve this problem for operators. If you want to take a deep dive into all things golf-data, read our latest article on The Golf Data Revolution, where we discuss what is happening in the world of data and AI and examine other industries in detail — I promise it will provide some insight and inspiration.

In the end, this all comes down to a pretty simple trend.

AI is here, and it needs your data to deliver real results.

If you want to have an AI strategy, start with a data strategy first. There is no AI without data.