Alba's Off-Season Playbook

Across the Alba network this April, bookings per simulator bay were up 96% on April 2025. That’s to say if a bay had 100 bookings last April, it had 196 this one. April is a shoulder month, neither high nor low season, and yet the lift is dramatic.

The demand is there, Alba provides partner venues with the tools to go and grab that demand, irrespective of the time of year. Some owner/operators historically might have simply crossed their fingers they make it to autumn, but the gap between venues that actively programme the summer and those that don't is real, it’s noticeable and it's growing.

This isn't a magic formula. It's a collection of things we've seen work across our partner venues, plus a few ideas that deserve more experimentation than they typically get. Many facilities are leaving more on the table than they realise, and the levers aren't complicated, they just require treating summer as a different season with different tactics rather than a quiet stretch to wait out.

1. The pre-round warm-up most venues miss

If your venue sits near or on a golf course, you have an asset that's easy to overlook: the pre-round warm-up slot. Range practice before a round is fine up to a point, but most golfers do it out of habit rather than because it's actually useful. Pay for a bucket, hit a few wedges, a few seven irons, maybe a couple of drives if the range is long enough (and many aren't). Then they walk to the first tee having learnt very little about where their ball flight or their miss is on that particular day.

A 15 or 30-minute simulator slot before a round is a different kind of warm-up. Drivers, no range balls, and most importantly, numbers: swing speed, face to path, launch angle, smash factor. Golfers can make small adjustments on the bay before those misses cost them shots out on the course. It's a warm-up that gives feedback rather than just a loosening exercise.

For venues running on Alba, the 15-minute interval calendar is built exactly for this. Low friction, short commitment, easy to action on. The pricing is interesting too, because you're competing with a bucket of balls that probably costs somewhere between $7 and $20. There's a real argument for positioning a short sim session as the better pre-round warm-up, and golfers should be willing to pay for that, particularly if a coffee is part of the deal.

2. Seasonal membership: not a discount, a different product

The instinct when summer comes is to discount your way through it. We'd push back on that, not because discounting never works, but because it tends to solve the wrong problem. The issue isn't that your regular members think you're too expensive in summer. It's that occasional and potential customers don't have enough of a reason to commit.

A seasonal membership, say from May to September, priced somewhere around 60-70% of what the equivalent period of an annual would cost, does something different. It's a low-barrier entry point. You could position it as unlimited hours with sensible rules around it, or build it around a specific use case. A one-off, paid up-front membership appeals to a customer set that wouldn't otherwise commit to a full year.

We've seen this play out across our venues. The person who takes a summer membership and actually uses it, who shows up in June and July, tends to convert to a full annual membership in autumn at a much higher rate than someone who just bought individual sessions. They've already built the habit, and the venue has already done the work of introducing them to the product.l

It's also worth remembering that in many markets the demand for golf is far outweighing the supply. Some customers will book indoor simply because there's no outdoor opportunity available in the time they've got. And there's a whole newer demographic of golfers who may never set foot on a traditional green-grass course, for whom indoor isn't an alternative, it's the product.

3. Pricing, properly

Blanket discounting is the least interesting tool here. If you drop your headline rate 20-30% for the summer and then raise it again in October, you've trained your customers to see your normal price as artificial. The more interesting approaches are quieter.

Dynamic pricing on last-minute availability is a good place to start. A bay that earns nothing contributes nothing, and 60% of rate is better than zero. Time-of-day tiering that's always visible, presented as how the venue works rather than as a discount, lets you fill off-peak without devaluing peak. Different structures for different customer types, members versus walk-ins, individuals versus groups, all serve different purposes. None of this is exotic. Hotels and airlines have been doing yield management for decades. Indoor golf is just getting started with it.

With Alba you can finally see your RevPAR (revenue per available resource hour), which should be your guiding number for what levers to pull. Discounting moves utilisation but often at the cost of yield. Smart pricing structures move both, in the right direction.

4. Unstaffed is a viable summer alternative

Year-round unstaffed venues are growing in number, and the economics are easy to see: lower labour costs against lower demand makes the model work. For staffed venues, switching to unstaffed during the summer months is worth a look. Demand drops off and becomes less predictable, which is exactly the situation where paying for staff to sit and wait stops making sense.

There are usually some up-front costs to install door and access control, but Alba integrates with 10+ providers and SimLock handles the bay-side automation. You get full control without the labour. When October rolls around and demand picks up again, you flip back to a full-service staffed experience. The bonus, even when fully staffed, is that members can access the venue outside staff hours, which is its own small revenue stream.

5. Rainy days are your friend

You can see a wet Wednesday or Thursday coming on Monday morning. That's a 48-72-hour window to reach your customer base with something timely: bad weather incoming, come in for a session - especially if they're regular members.

The audience this targets is exactly who you want, committed golfers whose outdoor plans just got rained off. They're not going to sit at home. They want to play golf. If your message lands at the right moment, you're not competing with outdoor golf at all, you're the obvious alternative for a day that's already been disrupted.

The mechanic is simple. The execution requires having a channel to your customers that you actually use regularly enough that they open it. Private member groups, email lists, Instagram Stories, whatever works for your audience. But it only works if you move quickly when the forecast moves.

6. Lessons, clinics, and coaching

We all love winter in the indoor golf world, but winter is also when a fairly significant cohort of golfers go into hibernation. Clubs packed away, not playing, not thinking about what's wrong with their swing beyond the odd YouTube video, just waiting for next season. Summer comes around, they set foot on the course, and they realise they've regressed. Distance gone, strike inconsistent, last year's miss creeping back in.

That makes summer a perfect time to build coaching programmes. Individual lessons through a simulator with launch monitor data are useful in a way that's hard to replicate anywhere else. You get actual numbers along with the pro's read on what's happening. Small group clinics have better economics and tend to be stickier. A six-week summer series with a theme, short game, driving, whatever the cohort needs, gives people a reason to show up on a schedule.

Venues that run these well generate a core group of regulars who often become the most loyal customers going into autumn. You might even convert a few of them into year-round players. Alba's pro/coach scheduling tool is a key part of this, and many partners use it well beyond the sim bays, for on-course, short game, and putting green lessons.

7. Lunchtime leagues for city venues

Leagues are underused in summer, and we think it's because people default to thinking of golf formats as requiring everyone to be in the same place at the same time. In a city-centre venue, that's a significant coordination overhead. Flexible-schedule leagues solve it. Define the window (say six to eight weeks), define the format, then let people complete their round whenever it works for them within that window. Scores feed into a live leaderboard. Nobody has to coordinate four diaries.

The lunchtime angle is specific and real. Urban office workers have a lunch hour, they often play golf, and in summer they're watching colleagues sneak off to courses on Friday afternoons. A lunchtime league they can dip into on their own terms, competitive, social, but flexible enough to fit around actual work, is an appealing proposition.

Leagues also build community. Someone who joins a summer league is usually on their way to becoming a loyal member, if they're not already.

8. Events: the highest-ceiling opportunity most venues underuse

This is probably the biggest lever in the off-season that most venues aren't fully leaning into. Corporate events, kick-offs, all-hands, investor days, team-building afternoons, are a natural fit for an indoor golf venue with a bit of space and the right setup. Golf provides built-in structure, everyone's doing the same thing, it's social without requiring any particular athletic ability, and it tends to generate the kind of looseness and conversation that makes a company event actually worthwhile rather than just a box to tick.

The private side is just as untapped. Birthday parties, bachelor parties, family get-togethers. A venue that actively markets itself for hire, with a clear package and a simple booking process, is playing a completely different revenue game than one that waits for walk-ins.

The economics are attractive too. Larger groups, predictable revenue, often booked well in advance, and they don't require the same ongoing marketing effort as filling individual bay bookings. One decent corporate relationship can anchor a significant chunk of summer revenue on its own.

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There's a meaningful gap between venues that treat summer as a different season with different tactics, as opposed to not changing anything and expecting similar results, or simply waiting for the cold weather to roll around again. The data we're seeing suggests that gap is worth somewhere between 10-25% on topline revenue, which is the difference between a tough summer and a good one.

If one or two of these resonate and you want to dig in further, get a no-obligation demo, or share what's worked for your venue and what hasn't, we'd love to hear from you. The Alba network is most useful when partners are sharing what's actually working.