Insights · The Business
Dues bought the golf. The week has to earn the guest.
Initiation and dues bought access. The week has to prove the guest was worth the ask.
It is often said that a private club sells golf. That has not been true for a long time.
What the member bought — initiation, dues, the wait if there is one — is access. The golf is already paid. The member-guest is the week the club has to prove the guest was worth the ask.
JJ Keegan’s lane is club economics: dues up, expectations up, services over goods. Apply that to the week, not the year. If the initiation fee rose and the clubhouse was renovated, the guest does not experience the capital project. The guest experiences three days: a pin sheet that is right, a dinner that is not a buffet with a name, a first-tee photo that looks like a club that meant it.
The week is not a green-fee product
A resort can talk occupancy. A club talks subscriptions. The member-guest does not create the membership. It either defends it or it leaks it. A sloppy Sunday is a January conversation.
Named weeks do more of that work because the name travels. Duke’s Cup at Southern Highlands Golf Club is not the same product as Robert Trent Jones Cup at Southern Highlands Golf Club on the same property. Chianti Classic at The Bridges at Rancho Santa Fe sells a table as much as a tee sheet. A generic “annual member-guest” sells the fact that you have one. Guests remember which.
Where the spend has to show
Guests remember three things. Everything else is overhead you can defend or cut. The field — 1233 weeks clubs already published a still for — is not a survey. It is a catalog of what clubs were willing to put a photo on. Themes, food names, lottery nights: those are the stills. The pin sheet never makes the album. It still decides whether the week felt expensive.
If the dues went up and the gift is a logoed towel, you taught the guest the wrong lesson.
The hard question
If your initiation fee is the highest it has been in a decade, does this year’s member-guest look like it? Write the P&L before the theme. The magazine stays free. A written plan is on /services/.
From the field
- Duke’s Cup Southern Highlands Golf Club
- Robert Trent Jones Cup Southern Highlands Golf Club
- Chianti Classic The Bridges at Rancho Santa Fe
More from the desk
A written plan for this year’s week. Request a consult · Services · All insights