Players, fans and media may not have reached a verdict on the PGA Tour’s inaugural FedEx Cup, but the directors who run the four playoff events have the financial results to declare it a success.
At East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, site of this week’s Tour Championship finale, corporate hospitality sales were up 37 percent over last year and tickets sales spiked nearly 30 percent.
The tournament, which was moved from its November date, sold out of its higher-end hospitality inventory and sold nine new private or semiprivate hospitality packages. Package prices ranged from $4,300 to $165,000, and the club debuted a new facility on the front nine dubbed the Delta Crown Room Championship Club. New hospitality sales manager Martin Stephenson was brought in last March and sold more than $500,000 in new accounts by focusing on smaller, more affordable packages, according to tournament director Todd Rhinehart.
The Tour Championship increased the number of available tickets from 18,000 to 25,000 (both numbers include hospitality). Aside from its internal staff, the East Lake Foundation volunteer sales force sold about $1.2 million in tickets, up 22 percent in revenue from 2006. Only weekly ticket books were sold until Aug. 1, when multiday and daily tickets went on sale. “Clubhouse tickets are the main area of growth as we grow towards our goal of an eventual tickets renewal list by 2009,” Rhinehart said.
The first three FedEx Cup playoff events experienced similar increases in sales to corporations and individual ticket buyers. At the start of the BMW Championship near Chicago, tournament spokesman Gary Holaway estimated that ticket sales were up 15 percent and corporate sales increased more than 65 percent from a year ago. The Deutsche Bank Championship outside Boston saw corporate sales increase about 10 percent over last year, and ticket sales were up 20 percent, including first-ever sellouts for the final two rounds.
The Barclays, at Westchester Country Club in New York, which Tiger Woods chose to skip, sold 30 percent more corporate sponsorship than 2006, sold out of hospitality for the first time, and general admission ticket sales were up 50 percent from last year. Tournament director Peter Mele specifically attributed the across-the-board increases to the FedEx Cup format.
TV ratings have not been as quick to respond to the new playoff. Overnight ratings for NBC’s airing of the Deutsche Bank, which included an extra hour this year, were down 14.9 percent and 6.7 percent for the final two rounds. Both ratings were up substantially from 2005.
Final ratings for CBS’s coverage of The Barclays were down 64 percent and 54 percent for the final two rounds, respectively, when compared the World Golf Championship event staged during that weekend last year.
