Noteefy, a leading demand and revenue management platform, has acquired Metolius Golf, a data intelligence company, a merger that combines their tools and intelligence into a combined platform for golf course operators. Photo is of Lost Rail, a Nebraska facility in the 60-property Landscapes Unlimited management portfolio.
Erik Matuszewski
While U.S. golf courses have gotten more efficient at filling tee sheets, especially from a technology standpoint – with a record number of rounds-played in four of the past five years – operators are for the most part still lacking an ability to know, in real time, what the impact is on their financial and operational health.
A new industry pairing is looking to close that gap, with Noteefy acquiring Metolius Golf in a deal that touches almost 10% of the approximately 16,000 U.S. golf courses.
Noteefy is a fast-growing demand management platform (more than 1,000 courses in total) that helps course owners and operators refill cancellations, eliminate no-shows, and optimize golfer booking with tools like an AI assistant to field golf shop calls. It’s a platform that’s proven beneficial for courses in helping fill unused tee times – a $1 billion lost opportunity – and for golfers in securing tee times in an increasingly competitive environment. Metolius is a data intelligence platform that works with 600-plus courses, aggregating operational data from not only the tee sheet, but point-of-sale, accounting, email, consumer databases, and advertising systems into a single dashboard.
By combining the two platforms, operators will be able to theoretically be able to see demand before it converts, compare it in real time against how the business is actually doing financially, and act on AI-flagged recommendations related to revenue pace, forecasted membership sales, and how weather patterns are affecting rounds and revenue.
“The goal is to give operators all the tools they need at their fingertips,” said Noteefy CEO and co-founder Jake Gordon, likening the pairing of the two platforms to a new command-and-control center.
“It’s a massive accelerant. We now have ability to get insights and information about trends at the macro level. That will help make product development decisions and see where we can help.”
The combination of Noteefy and Metolius is an effort to reduce fragmentation, as many course operators have long juggled different systems: one might be for tee sheet data, another for website and marketing, and waitlist demand in a third.
The result is that performance reports might take six-to-eight weeks before they’re all stitched together, Gordon says, and operators are “mostly flying blind” during that time.
“Golf is in an incredible bull state. But if the tide goes out and it gets challenging… operators need tools to understand their business,” Gordon says. “For us, a huge source of inspiration is the restaurant, travel or hotel industry, where an end-to-end stack is table stakes.”
As part of the acquisition, Metolius founder Ross Liggett is joining Noteefy as vice president of data and will work directly with course operators while leading the company’s data strategy, analytics platform and customer intelligence capabilities.
While still in the early stages of the partnership, the combined platform will give operators AI-enabled analytics that flag anomalies and provide insights, such as recommendations on pricing, staffing and marketing moves that create added revenue. Over time, this will give smaller management groups and independent operators the same suite of decision-based tools that previously only the biggest MCOs have had.
“For years we managed course forecasting and performance manually, region by region and property by property. Metolius turned our fragmented data sources into a real-time, portfolio-wide source of truth for every decision-maker in the company,” said John Pugliese, the CEO of Landscapes Unlimited and Landscapes Golf Management, which manages more than 60 courses. “Combined with AI and embedded into our support model, it’s become the operational backbone for how we run our courses. Together with Noteefy, which we use for demand management, we are excited to see the continued impact this platform can make for our portfolio.”
Golfers themselves might not see the direct benefits from this new pairing, though the Noteefy side of the business will continue to make getting tee times easier.
For operators, however, the acquisition will be far more impactful, providing a single revenue-moving system instead of a patchwork of tools that aren’t connected with one another and helping align golf with other service industries, from restaurants to hotels.