How Much Should You Charge for a Sim Golf League?

Most facilities price a league by checking what the place across town charges and going five dollars under. That is a reliable way to lose money on what should be your most profitable night of the week.

Your competitor has different bay costs, a different rent, and possibly no idea what they are doing either. Price from your own numbers.

Start from the bay hour

A league is not a product you invented. It is bay time, sold in advance, in bulk, with organization attached. So the floor for your price is what that bay time is worth.

Work out how many bay hours the league actually consumes. Take the number of bays, times hours per session, times weeks.

Four bays, two hours a night, ten weeks is 80 bay hours. At a $50 rack rate that is $4,000 of inventory. If you sell that league for $2,400, you did not run a profitable league. You ran a 40 percent discount on your best inventory and added work for your staff.

The league only makes sense if it beats what those bays would have earned otherwise. On a dead Tuesday that bar is low, which is exactly why leagues belong on dead nights. On a Saturday it is high, which is why leagues do not belong there.

A worked example

Say you run a ten week league on Tuesdays, four bays, two sessions of two hours, so 16 players in teams of two.

That is 80 bay hours. Your Tuesday bays currently run about 30 percent occupancy, so realistically you are giving up about 24 hours of business you would have had anyway, or $1,200 at a $50 rate.

Now price per player. At $150 for the season, 16 players is $2,400. Subtract the $1,200 you displaced and the league nets you $1,200 of genuinely new revenue, before food and drink.

Food and drink is where this gets good. Sixteen people in your building for two hours, ten weeks running, at even $15 a head is another $2,400. For most facilities the bar tab is the real return on a league, and it is the reason a league beats simply discounting bay time to fill the same hours.

What to include and what to charge separately

Include: all bay time for the season, scoring and standings, and any end of season prize or trophy.

Charge separately: food, drink, and anything a player might not want. Bundling a $20 shirt into everyone's entry fee raises your headline price and makes the league look expensive to the person deciding whether to join.

Be specific about makeup weeks in advance. “Miss a week and you can play your round any time before Sunday” is a real feature that justifies real money, and it stops the slow attendance bleed that kills week six.

Per player or per team

Price per player, even in team leagues.

A $300 team price sounds worse than $150 a player, even though it is the same money, and it forces two people to sort out payment between themselves before they can commit. That friction costs you signups.

Let each player pay their own entry. You will collect faster and chase less.

Do not fund the prize pool yourself

If you want a payout, carve it out of the entry fee and say so. Ten dollars of a $150 entry across 16 players is a $160 pot, which is plenty for bragging rights.

Adding a $500 prize out of your own pocket to make the league attractive is a sign the league is not attractive for other reasons. Fix the format or the night instead. People join leagues to play regularly with people they like, not to win money.

Collect upfront

Take the full season fee before week one. Weekly collection sounds friendlier and creates a season of small problems: the player who is short this week, the one who misses three weeks and wants a refund, and the awkward conversation in week eight.

Upfront payment also fixes attendance. Someone who has paid $150 shows up on a cold night. Someone paying $15 at the door does not.

If the number feels like too much to ask at once, shorten the league. Six weeks at $90 is an easier sell than ten weeks at $150, and it is a better first league anyway.

Know when you have priced too low

Selling out in 48 hours is not a win. It means you left money on the table and you will leave it again next season unless you change something.

Signs you are underpriced: an instant sellout, a waitlist longer than a third of your field, or players telling you it is a great deal. That last one is a compliment and a warning at the same time.

Raise in increments of $25 between seasons. In most markets, a returning roster absorbs a 15 percent increase without any measurable drop, because they are deciding whether to keep doing something they already enjoy, not whether to try something new.

Price winter higher than summer

Your product is scarce in January and abundant in June. Charging the same in both is leaving money on the table in your best season and overcharging in your worst.

A $175 winter league and a $125 summer league is normal and nobody objects, because everyone understands why indoor golf is worth more when it is 20 degrees outside.

Once you have your number, the rest is execution. Our guide to filling a league covers recruiting, and filling slow nights covers what else to run on the nights a league does not solve.

When you are ready to take signups, setting up the league is free.