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Uncooking the Myrtle Beach Golf Numbers!  By The Watchman

It is a well known fact that the bungling spinmeisters at the Myrtle Beach area golf marketing monopoly, Myrtle Beach Golf Holiday, ably assisted by their incompetent cronies at the Myrtle Beach Golf Course Owners Association, were “cooking the books” long before it became fashionable on Wall Street.

Unlike Wall Street, these bozos haven’t been “cooking” their financial numbers, but rather the number of paid golf rounds played in the Myrtle Beach area, the number of golfers visiting Myrtle Beach, as well as the numbers of golfers flying into the Myrtle Beach International Airport.

Needless to say, with the Myrtle Beach golf industry teetering on the verge of virtual collapse, it’s time for the truth be told!

The last great year for Myrtle Beach golf was in 1998, when visiting golfers played 4,169,992 paid rounds on 94.2 golf courses. In 1999, Golf Holiday started adding “member” rounds to their “paid” rounds calculations. There were 526,979 member rounds played in 1998.
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Therefore, using Golf Holiday’s current accounting methods, there were 4,695,971 paid rounds played in 1998, which, in turn, worked out to an average of 49,851 paid rounds per golf course.

In 2004, Golf Holiday stated that there were 3,973,947 paid rounds played on 122.6 Myrtle Beach area golf courses, of which there were 579,486 member rounds. That translates into a loss of 722,024 paid rounds per year. Therefore, between 1999 and 2004, while the number of courses increased by 16.3%, Golf Holiday’s incompetent marketing caused the number of paid rounds to drop by an astounding 15.4%.

Based upon Golf Holiday’s 112.6 golf courses, the average number of paid rounds per course was only 35,293 in 2004. That pitiful number represents a net loss of 14,558 average paid rounds per course, or a 29.3% annual loss per course.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, let’s get down to the “real” numbers, which Golf Holiday tries so hard to cover-up with all their BS. To do so one must revert back to Golf Holiday’s 1998 accounting practices, and subtract all “member” rounds, which are basically “local play,” and financially nebulous at best. After doing just that, there would have been 4,169,997 paid rounds played in 1998, for an average of 44,268 paid round per course. By comparison, in 2004 there would have only been 3,394,461 paid rounds played, for only 30,146 average paid rounds per course. The harsh reality of this is that the average paid rounds per course crashed by 14,123, for an annual average loss of 31.9% per course.

Note: As an industry-wide rule of thumb, the number of paid rounds required for a golf course to break even is approximately 36,000 rounds per year.

Golf Holiday is also fond of touting that 1.2 million golfers visit the Myrtle Beach area each year to play golf, which is yet another of their fabricated statistics. Again Golf Holiday’s own numbers reveal the truth. Here again, after removing “member/local” rounds there were only 3,394,461 rounds of paid golf rounds played in the Myrtle Beach area in 2004, which, using Golf Holiday’s claim of 1.2 million golfers translates into only 2.8 rounds played per visiting golfer.

In fact, the actual average number of paid rounds played by golfers visiting Myrtle Beach is a minimum of 3.6 rounds per visit. Therefore, Golf Holiday’s 3,394,461 paid rounds only produces 942,905 visiting golfers annually, a difference of 257,095 (-21.4%) golfers from their trumped-up 1.2 million golfer claim.

Lately, Golf Holiday has added eye-of-newt to its cauldron of numerical bovine excrement – the percentage of golfers flying into the Myrtle Beach airport each year.

In a presentation before Horry County Council in June of 2005, Golf Holiday’s head spinner, Mickey McCamish, went on the record stating that, “70% of all golfers fly into Myrtle Beach.” Less than 30 days later, in a July 24, 2005 front-page article in the Sun News, a memory-challenged McCamish stated that, “60% of all golfers fly into Myrtle Beach.”

As usual, these Golf Holiday fabrications also flunk both the “laugh” and “smell” tests!

If one were so naïve as to give any credence to either of McCamish’s bogus percentages; his “70%” claim would (using the actual 942,905 visiting golfer total) mean that 660,000 golfers would have flown into the Myrtle Beach airport in 2004, while his equally ridiculous “60%” claim would represent 565,743 golfers flying in.

In 2004, the total deplanements at the Myrtle Beach International Airport were 766,268.

Note: One must not forget that Myrtle Beach golf visitation is strictly seasonal and is confined to the spring (February – May) and fall (September – November) seasons.

The spring 2004 deplanements at the Myrtle Beach airport totaled 268,734, or 35% of all deplanements in 2004. The fall deplanements totaled 172,758, or 22.5% of all 2004 deplanements. The total spring and fall golf season deplanements in 2004 were 441,492, or 57.5% of the airport’s total deplanements for the year.

Again, if someone were foolish enough to swallow McCamish’s 70% claim to the Horry County Council, that would mean that 188,114 golfers arrived by plane in the spring of 2004, and another 120,931 arrived in the fall, for a total of 309,769 golfer deplanements for the year.

As to McCamish’s equally ludicrous 60% claim made to the Sun News that, in turn, would mean that 161,240 golfers arrived by plane in the spring of 2004, and another 103,655 arrived by plane in the fall of 2004, for a total of 264,895 golfer deplanements for the year.

Needless to say, the 309,769 (70%) falls 350,231 deplaning golfers short of McCamish’s BS to County Council, while the 264,895 (60%) falls 300,848 golfers short of the crap he fed the Sun News.

And so it goes in the mess that is Myrtle Beach golf!

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