Throughout my time at AllBooked, I’ve spoken with countless golf simulator owners, hosted webinars, and recently moderated a conversation on how to run a profitable golf simulator facility. This experience, coupled with my background in business, puts me in a unique position to answer one of the most common questions facility owners ask: “How should I properly price my golf simulator bookings?”
The short answer is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. The long answer is exactly what we’ll explore in this article.
The cost of the “wrong” pricing model isn’t always loud
While you don’t need me to tell you that the wrong pricing structure hurts your business, it’s worth understanding how that plays out, because it’s not as obvious as a customer telling you they aren’t a fan of how much a bay costs.
Your customers may be available to go to an 11 a.m. reservation, but might choose not to simply because it costs too much and there’s another sim down the road that’s cheaper. Others may opt out of renewing a membership since prime time was always booked out and they never got to play when they wanted to.
The moral of the story is that wrong pricing doesn’t blatantly make itself known. It quietly caps what your facility can earn.
The upside to all this? Most of these factors are in your control, and it all comes down to your membership and pricing strategies.
What your membership and pricing model depends on
The next three points help you understand the market you're in, the competition, and how your own bays are doing. Why? Because these inputs guide your pricing strategy.
Identify who your facility is actually for.
Whether you’re still building or already open, there’s one question that’ll help you narrow your focus: who is your facility actually for? You don’t want to have the same offerings as another facility in your area, and you don’t want to be something nobody’s asking for. So while a no-frills training sim might seem like the right move if there’s already a facility down the road offering food and beverage, look a layer deeper.
Do the local country club’s golfers even have an appetite for keeping skills up when they can’t play outside? Is there a high school golf program that loses practice space during the winter?
If you’re already open, you’ve got an advantage here. You don’t need to guess who your facility is for, because the data has been telling you for months.
Look at what your own booking data tells you.
If your facility is already open, run a report on demand. The overarching question you’re trying to answer is: Are my golf simulators priced in a way that makes my business profitable?
The more data you collect, the more trends you uncover to refine your strategy.
Look to answer questions like:
- Who is booking which bays?
- When are they booking them?
- How long are they booking each bay for?
- Are certain bays booked more frequently than others?
- What days and times are most popular?
Don’t just copy competitor pricing or offer cheaper rates. Find the gaps in their models.
The obvious move is to benchmark your pricing against competitors, but the smarter one is to identify the gaps in their strategies and figure out how you can fill them.
If the sim in your area prices all bays, no matter the size, at $30 per hour, could you offer smaller bays that are less expensive during prime time to capture demand?
Operating within this line of thinking keeps you one step ahead of the competition.
How to figure out your membership/pricing strategy
Now that you understand what influences your pricing model, we’re going to outline exactly how to figure out what’ll land with your customers and make your golf simulator business profitable.
1. Work backwards: Estimate or identify both fixed and variable costs
Examples of fixed costs:
- Leases
- Insurance
- Equipment financing
- Software subscriptions
- Permits
- Internet
- Security systems
- Wifi
Examples of variable costs:
- Cleaning fees
- Hourly employee wages
- Consumables (like golf balls, clubs, water cups, etc.)
- Utilities tied to usage
- Repairs and maintenance
2. Do the math: Find your monthly break-even point
It’s helpful to start looking at this through the lens of how much each “bay hour” will cost you.
Fixed cost per booked bay hour:
Total monthly fixed costs ÷ Expected monthly booked bay hours = Fixed cost per booked bay hour
Break-even cost per booked hour:
Fixed cost per booked bay hour + Variable cost per booked hour = Break-even cost per booked hour
Once you have these numbers mapped out, you’ll know the minimum amount of money you need to charge per bay hour. Then, decide how much profit you want to make on top of that.
Target revenue per booked hour:
Break-even cost per booked hour + Desired profit per booked hour = Target revenue per booked hour
For example, if your break-even cost is $15 per booked hour and you want to make $10 in profit, your target revenue is:
$15 + $10 = $25 per booked hour
3. Price for the market you’re actually in, but on your own terms
You’re onto the fun part: where you get to set up your business’ unique pricing structure using all the data you gathered on your market, competitors, and, if you’re already operating, current business trends.
Here’s the data worth considering as you build out your plan:
- What people are willing to pay in your area for an hour of sim time
- The gaps in your competitors’ pricing strategies
- The types of golfers your facility is built for
- When demand is greatest for golf simulators in your area, both seasonally and weekly
While all of these factors contribute to the overall plan, you control the way you get there.
For example, using the example above, your target revenue per booked hour is $25. That doesn’t mean every hour needs to be priced at $25. You can price below and above that number at different times. Your booked hours just need to average out to at least $25.
This is where strategy comes in. Below are the three structures I see most often, and when I'd recommend each one.
Ideas for your models
Membership-exclusive bookings
I’d recommend this model if you want to create an exclusive, lounge-like, premier club feel. However, by making access to your facility membership-only, you are gating off one of the easiest ways for new customers to discover you: one-off hourly bookings.
One workaround is to offer a one-time paid hourly booking or give members the option to bring a friend. This keeps new business flowing, while still preserving the community feel that drives loyalty—and recurring revenue.
Memberships coupled with hourly bookings that have peak + off-peak pricing
I’d recommend this model for a facility who wants to build a base of regulars for recurring revenue and create a strong sense of community, without making it harder to capture new business.
By giving members special perks, like early access to bookings, they can reserve bays before non-members. Non-members can then book whatever availability is left, with pricing adjusted strategically based on peak and off-peak demand.
Essentially, this model gives you the best of both worlds. You have predictable, recurring revenue coming in month over month, while still using peak and off-peak pricing to manage demand, fill in hours, and bring in additional revenue.
Hourly bookings with peak and off-peak pricing
I’d generally advise against relying on hourly bookings alone. The only exception would be if your model has extremely consistent demand and isn’t heavily affected by seasonality.
Even then, memberships are critical for building recurring revenue and retaining regulars, so it never hurts to make them part of your overall pricing strategy.
Here’s how some real operators have done it
Those three models are starting points. What operators actually build on top of them is where it gets interesting, and I've seen some genuinely creative approaches.
Golf630’s membership strategy
Brian Stenson, owner of Golf630, created his entire pricing strategy based on the concept that golf simulator businesses are “hotel models.” If one bay isn’t booked at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, that’s revenue that simply can’t be recovered.
Brian’s goal is to have every single person become a member, and his entry-level tier is what gets them in the door. One of the most interesting parts of his model is the way he structures his Memberships, which were intentionally designed as both a path towards upsells and a way to manage demand.
- The lowest tier is $99 per month for 4 hours of play time.
- The middle tier is $225 per month for 12 hours of play time, with 24/7 access.
- The highest tier and gives members unlimited golf, up to 4 hours per day, with 24/7 access.
- A student plan was created for local high school golfers.
- A “home for the summer” plan for college students, which Brian put together as a favor. What he didn't expect was that those guys would end up filling his bays at 2 a.m.
If you look closer, he's running a peak and off-peak model through two levers at once.
For non-members, the hourly rate goes from $40 to $45 at 4 p.m. on Friday. His lowest membership tier can book anytime from midnight on Sunday up until that same 4 p.m. Friday cutoff, but not past it. So, the moment his rates go up is the same moment his entry-level members lose access.
Pin High PGH’s membership strategy
Nick Notto, owner of Pin High PGH, deliberately started small with one bay and decided to wait on memberships.
His reasoning is one of the most useful things I heard, because it describes the exact situation where memberships don’t work in your favor. As Nick put it, “Members typically book popular times, and if the popular times are consistently booked by the same person, that prevents potential customers from coming in.”
With only one bay, a member playing at 6 p.m. occupies a space that a new customer otherwise would have paid full price for, but couldn't.
Once he noticed that his peak window, 5 to 9 p.m., was at capacity with one bay, the only answer was to add another. It was only when he added his second bay that he introduced memberships. Even then, Nick was cautious and kept memberships simple with just one practice tier.
He was intentional about why. “It was designed around my business and the hours I need to fill specifically.”
The final verdict
Memberships and hourly dynamic pricing each serve a different purpose, but when they’re used together, they can help your golf simulator business drive profit more efficiently.
My final recommendation: Use a combination of memberships and peak and off-peak hourly pricing unless you’re running an exclusive membership-only facility, have extremely consistent demand year-round, or another unique business model that makes one approach more practical than the other.
To see how AllBooked can help you put a combination pricing strategy like this into practice, reach out below.
