Do golfers book more rounds of resort golf during major championships?

With 2020 in the books and a fairly traditional stretch of major championships planned before us, we decided to look back and see if we could find a correlation between these key dates on the golfing calendar and rounds of golf being booked at resorts across the country. Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked solely at the number of golf transactions that took place across three seasons at U.S. resorts with golf facilities. For each major championship we started on the Tuesday before (as media coverage and practice rounds ramped up) and went until the Monday after (to include the effect of Monday print headlines) to create stretch of seven days as our baseline. We then compared that week to the two weeks before and after the tournament.

Note that with some of the data coming from mountain resorts still covered in snow during The Masters, we’ve excluded it from the analysis.

While the bar chart may not be the typical format, we grouped the data in this way to better highlight what we found. Rather than majors alone having an impact, it appears to be a combination of both the event but also the time of year. Each showed at least a slight increase in transactions the week of a major compared to the previous week, but the weeks after were the most telling.

What This Means
The simple answer is, yes, for this sample it does appear that a major championship increased the interest in and relevance of golf to the point that people actually did something about it. But let’s look closer because none of these points seem to sit in isolation.

For the US Open, a one-two punch with Father’s day sees the most rapid increase in transactions. Though the British (Open Championship) sees a small rise and may have less of an impact because of live broadcast times in the US, because it occurs during summer golf season the transaction rate is much higher than almost all weeks around the US Open. The PGA Championship sees the most clear peak during the event but also a rapid decline afterwards: perhaps signaling the beginning of the end of golf travel season for many.