Pricing is one of the most powerful levers you have as an indoor golf operator, and one of the most underused. Most venues set a single hourly rate when they open and leave it unchanged for months or years. The venues that optimise their pricing consistently outperform those that do not, often significantly, without any increase in marketing spend or customer acquisition effort.
This guide covers the four pricing dimensions you should configure for your venue, and the logic behind each one.
Base rate and session lengths
Your base rate is the standard price for a session during off-peak hours. It should be set based on your local market, your cost structure, and the quality of your offering relative to competitors.
The session lengths you offer determine the range of price points available to customers. A venue that offers only one-hour sessions has a single price point. A venue that offers 45-minute, 90-minute, and two-hour sessions has four price points (including the one-hour option), which means it can capture customers at different willingness-to-pay levels and different time constraints.
When setting prices for different session lengths, avoid simple linear scaling. A 90-minute session should not cost exactly 1.5 times the one-hour rate. Customers perceive value in longer sessions, so a slight discount for longer bookings, combined with the higher absolute revenue per booking, typically increases both conversion and average booking value.
Peak and off-peak pricing
Peak pricing is the practice of charging more during your most in-demand hours. For most indoor golf venues, peak hours are Friday evenings, Saturday mornings and afternoons, and Sunday mornings. Off-peak hours are weekday daytimes and late evenings.
The size of the peak premium varies by market and venue type, but a 20 to 35 percent premium over the off-peak rate is a reasonable starting range. The goal is not to maximise revenue from peak slots in isolation, but to optimise total revenue across all slots by using pricing to shift demand toward underutilised hours.
In Golf O'Clock, peak pricing is configured by defining time windows and assigning a rate multiplier or fixed price to each window. You can define as many windows as you need, and the system applies the correct rate automatically when a customer books. There is no manual intervention required once the rules are set up.
Member rates
If you offer memberships, your members should pay a different rate than casual customers. The member rate is typically a percentage discount off the standard rate, applied automatically when a member books through the portal.
The discount should be meaningful enough to make membership attractive, but not so large that it cannibalises your pay-as-you-go revenue. A 20 to 30 percent discount is a common range for basic memberships. Premium memberships that include a set number of sessions per month can use a different pricing model, where the monthly fee effectively pre-purchases sessions at a discounted rate.
Member rates should apply to all session lengths and all time windows, including peak hours. Excluding members from peak hour discounts creates friction and reduces the perceived value of membership.
Promotional and seasonal pricing
Beyond your standard pricing structure, you will occasionally want to run promotions or adjust pricing for seasonal demand. A January promotion to drive bookings during a traditionally slow month, a summer discount to compensate for reduced demand when outdoor golf is available, or a special rate for a local golf club partnership are all examples of pricing adjustments that can be configured in Golf O'Clock without changing your base rate structure.
The key to promotional pricing is defining clear start and end dates and communicating the promotion clearly to your customer base. A promotion that runs indefinitely stops being a promotion and becomes your new standard rate, which undermines your ability to use pricing as a lever in the future.
Review your pricing configuration at least quarterly. Look at your occupancy data by time slot and day of week, and ask whether your pricing is doing its job of filling off-peak slots without leaving money on the table during peak hours. Pricing is not a set-and-forget decision. It is an ongoing operational tool that should evolve as your venue and your market evolve.
Written by Mathieu Morin, CRO at Golf O'Clock. Based on operating data from 200+ indoor golf venues across North America, the UK, and Europe.