Vital Signs, january 8, 2016

     Golf tourism has been on the rise of late, and last year KPMG’s Golf Advisory Practice took the pulse of roughly four dozen golf tour operators. Based on the results of its survey, in “Golf Tourism Growth Trends” KPMG argues that “today’s positive trends in the golf tourism industry will continue in the coming years,” which is certainly welcome news for nations whose golf operations rely heavily on tourist traffic. The most active travelers live in what KPMG describes as “affluent nations with long-standing golfing traditions” -- it cites Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Scandinavia, and Germany -- and their favorite destinations are Spain and Portugal. The up-and-coming destinations: South Africa, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Southeast Asia (particularly Thailand and Vietnam), and Bulgaria. KPMG believes that the United States and Scotland “remain ever popular,” but it’s concluded that “golf travelers are exploring more destinations for their golf holidays and are now keener to travel beyond traditional golfing destinations.” When it comes to choosing destinations for golf vacations, KPMG says, the most important factors are easy accessibility (direct flights are best), the price of the tour, and the quality of the courses and accommodations.

     First, the good news: The five golf courses on Cyprus, the sunny Mediterranean island, had what the Cyprus Mail calls “one of the best years for golfing visitors” in 2014. The bad news? As a group, the courses managed to attract only 25,000 golfing visitors, just 1 percent of the total number of vacationers that Cyprus welcomed during 2014. The math works out to just 5,000 golfers -- most of them from Sweden, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and France -- per course, which raises concerns about the local golf industry’s long-term viability. (KPMG’s Golf Advisory Practice has calculated that the republic has only 1,303 “registered” golfers, a number hardly worth counting.) Nonetheless, the Mail says that the Cyprus Tourism Organization is “satisfied with this performance” because the golf traffic has been trending in the right direction in recent years. What’s more, the CTO believes that Cyprus would lure more golf travelers if it had more golf courses, so it’s trying to spark the construction of at least a half-dozen more.

     The lack of an indigenous golf population is also a ticking time bomb in Turkey, a nation of 75 million people with just 6,776 “registered” golfers, according to a recent study by KPMG’s Golf Advisory Service. Turkey’s golf participation rate is too tiny to calculate, and KPMG estimates that 45 percent of the nation’s “registered” golfers -- more than 3,000 of them -- are juniors, a group also known as people without money. To survive, Turkey’s existing golf properties, virtually all them clustered in Belek, the nation’s favorite vacation spot, depend on what amounts to the kindness of strangers. In recent years, the strangers have been uncommonly generous -- international golfers played 513,000 rounds in Turkey in 2014, according to KPMG -- but they tend to be fickle (a lot of them have Tasmania and Vietnam on their must-visit lists these days) and not as dependable a source of income as resident golfers. KPMG emphasizes that “it is crucial to develop local demand for the sport,” but the nation’s golf developers aren’t listening. They’ve proposed to build more than 30 new courses in places where tourists congregate instead of in Turkey’s population centers.

     ’Tis the season to make forecasts about what’s to come in our business, so a Singapore-based magazine publishing company has made some predictions about the near-term future of golf in its part of the world. In the January issue of Asian Golf, Asia Pacific Golf Group contends that 2016 will be “a sluggish year” for the region’s golf industry, which is suffering from “blows to its solar plexus” and has as a result sunk into a “state of malaise.” While asserting that it doesn’t want to “indulge in negative thinking,” APGG says that China has “temporarily become a dud,” Japan is “continuing to slide down a grease-lined track,” and South Korea is “becoming a little jaded.” Mixed metaphors aside, it warns that “there are more challenges out there in 2016 than there are opportunities.” It’s always tricky to read between the lines, but it sounds as if APGG may be going through some tough times of its own. Maybe next month it’ll tell us how its advertising sales are going.