Vital Signs, august 15, 2014

     Perhaps not surprisingly, the National Golf Foundation counts more U.S. golfers than Pellucid Corporation does. The United States currently has 24.7 million golfers, according to the NGF’s Golf Participation Report for 2013, down from 25.3 million in 2012. The NGF considers the loss of 600,000 players as being “within the range of sampling error,” so for public consumption it rounds up the number to 25 million. Overall, the group says, our nation’s participation rate is 8.5 percent. Pellucid believes that the United States now has fewer than 23 million golfers, a number last seen a quarter-century ago.

     The golf market in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia is over-saturated, and the editor of Inside Golf expects the herd to be thinned out dramatically over the next decade. Richard Fellner thinks that 20 percent of the city’s private clubs, mainly those in the southern and southeastern suburbs, will either close or merge with other clubs. “Golfers in general don’t want the private membership model anymore,” he told the Brisbane Times. The area’s “second-tier” private clubs are being squeezed the hardest by declines in play and participation, and Fellner believes that many of them are already on the endangered list. Australia currently has 1.2 million golfers, according to a recent study, 1.6 percent fewer than it had last year.

     All over the world, more people are traveling than ever before. “No matter what area on earth,” says Hotel Interactive, “tourism between countries is on the rise. And it’s climbing so much, it looks to be at record levels.” Most importantly, the boom in international travel isn’t expected to let up for decades. Citing data from the United Nations’ World Tourism Organization, the website predicts that global tourism will increase at an annual rate of at least 3.8 percent through 2030. “The tourism sector has shown a remarkable capacity to adjust to the changing market conditions,” a spokesman for the UNWTO said. “Indeed, tourism has been among the few sectors generating positive news for many economies.” Hotel Interactive doesn’t single out golf’s slice of the travel market, but it appears that the world’s “destination” venues will have plenty of opportunities to cash in.

     Amid all the black holes in the golf industry’s financial picture, there are a few bright spots. Here’s one: The number of female golfers in the United States grew by 260,000 last year. And here’s why that’s important: Although women make up only about one-quarter of the nation’s total golf population, the National Golf Foundation says that they out-spend men, on a per-capita basis, on purchases of equipment, apparel, and training aids. “Power, income, education -- everything is rising among the female demographic,” a spokesman for the PGA of American told the Findlay Courier. Now you know why savvy course operators are doing whatever they can to lure women, and why Billy Casper Golf bought a golf-networking group for women.

     Canadians may not be playing as much golf as they used to, but they’ve built a surprisingly large number of courses. Citing figures provided by Statistics Canada, Maclean’s reports that the nation has 2,400 courses that cater to an estimated 1.5 million golfers. Conveniently, the magazine notes that this is one golf course for every 625 golfers, a ratio that it says is “among the highest number per capita in the world.”

     Wang Jun’s Forward Management Group, which publishes trustworthy information about the Chinese golf industry, has updated its count of the nation’s courses. Through the end of 2013, the number stood at 639. According to Reuters, the number of courses in the People’s Republic has tripled since 2004, which just happens to be the year in which the nation’s ban on golf construction went into effect.