In Augusta, Georgia, there’s “busy,” and then there’s “Masters busy.”
With unknown factors in play, Augusta-area retailers and service providers are waiting to see which “busy” shows up for the city’s legendary golf tournament the first full week of April.
The Masters Tournament provides a commercial infusion into the area’s economy each year of a size that has only been estimated, since Augusta National Golf Club doesn’t release attendance figures. Previous estimates from local tourism officials place the annual economic impact at more than $100 million.
The coronavirus pandemic dealt the local economy a double blow last year. Travel restrictions to limit COVID-19’s spread delayed the Masters by seven months. That flattened the traditional spike of commercial activity last April, and dulled the spike last November when the tournament played to empty galleries, with no patrons allowed to attend.
This April, the tournament is allowing a limited number of spectators, but Augusta National has not disclosed that number.
The PGA of America announced recently that ticket sales to the Arnold Palmer Invitational, March 4-7, will be capped at 25%. The Players Championship, March 11-14, will be capped at 20%.
Media outlets in the past several years have tended to use an estimate of 40,000 attendees each Masters Tournament day. When Golf magazine asked Tiger Woods his thoughts last August about a Masters with no patrons, he replied: “It’s going to be very different without 40,000 people there.”
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Using the PGA caps as a proportional rule of thumb, it could be estimated that this year’s Masters would attract between 8,000 and 10,000 attendees.
“My sources are guys in the bar,” said Henry Scheer, the manager of TBonz Steakhouse, one of the more popular hangouts during Masters Week that often attracts caddies and some of the competing golfers. “I don’t know how good that will be, but I heard they’re letting in only 20% of the normal number of people that come in.”
Of course, he added, these are the same customers who told him he’d be busy for the rescheduled tournament.
“During November we weren’t sure how it would be, so we went a little higher than we should have in preparing as far as buying things and stuff,” Scheer said. “For this time, we’re bringing it down. It’s definitely not going to be a normal Masters.”
For Scheer, “busy” is a typical Saturday night, he said. “Masters busy” is, at least, a typical Saturday night every night of Masters Week, from Sunday to the following Sunday, often into the wee hours.
This April, Scheer is preparing for customer flow to be somewhere in between, because of uncertainties surrounding actual attendance and whether visitors will be in “a bubble,” which is how he describes patrons simply traveling to and from the course without otherwise venturing out.
“It’s better to prepare to be busy and not be busy than don’t be prepared to be busy and then get killed. That’s the restaurant business,” Scheer said. “We’ve been beat up before. We’re not going to be beat up again.”
Since COVID-19 is still limiting in-dining restaurant capacity, reducing customers to, say, a third of expected turnout wouldn’t pose a serious issue, said Simon Medcalfe, an economics professor at Augusta University.
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But since the business sector doesn’t know exactly what to expect, the community doesn’t know what kind of economic impact to expect, either, he said. Current conditions make behaviors hard to predict.
“A lot of us who live in the local area, are we still going to be here? Are we going to leave? Are houses being rented? Are houses not being rented? Who’s coming in? What types of people are coming in?” Medcalfe said. “All this is entirely unknown, and that just makes any precise estimate very difficult to provide.”
Getting a glimpse of where this year’s Masters economy is headed could lie within its past performance.
A common method of calculating tourism’s impact on an area is by analyzing the activity of hotels and motels where visitors often stay.
Jennifer Bowen, vice president of destination development for the Augusta Convention and Visitors Bureau, cited revenue gathered from Augusta’s hotel/ motel tax to show the tournament’s impact in a good year and an off-year.
In April 2019, the month of the last pre-COVID Masters, the tax took in $26,266,491. Last November, when COVID kept the Masters patron-less, the tax took in just $8,304,497.
“At the risk of stating the obvious, while we can’t predict the economic impact of the Masters 2021, we believe it will be somewhere in between the full impact we saw in 2019 and the no-patron impact we experienced in 2020,” Bowen said. “It will have an impact, and for that we are grateful.”
Columbia County hotel occupancy also showed a drop, but not as pronounced.
According to data collected for Columbia County by Smith Travel Research, the county’s hotels posted an 87.7% average occupancy rate during the 2019 Masters, April 7-14. For the 2020 Masters, Nov. 8-15, the occupancy average dropped to 74.4%. For the same week in November 2019, the rate was just 56.4%.
“So there were definitely people in town who were assisting with the 2020 tournament,” said Shelly Blackburn, executive director of the Columbia County Convention and Visitors Bureau. “And I think the main reason why we saw them in hotels is because schools were still in session, not as many people were willing to rent houses, and it wasn’t a typical break for our community as a whole. So I think that really pushed a lot of those vendors into hotels.”
Blackburn said she expects a similar pattern in April, but consumer circumstances have moved closer to normal. Spring break for Augusta-area public schools typically falls during Masters Week in April, and families seize the opportunity to leave town on vacation, often renting their vacated houses to visitors.
Columbia County hotels fared better than expected overall in 2020, starting in the summer, Blackburn said. Occupancy was buoyed by stays from traveling health professionals, construction crews for road projects and Amazon support staff connected to an Amazon fulfillment center under construction near Appling.
But when she emailed a small survey to Columbia County hoteliers last week to gauge occupancy for the next Masters, she said she got no responses.
“Unfortunately, April was by far the worst month in 2020 for all of the hotels,” Blackburn said. “And it’s such a competitive industry anyway, so they’re a little gun shy. They don’t know what to expect, and they’re worried.”
Housing rentals for Masters Week can prove more lucrative but are harder to track in terms of calculating economic impact. The Masters attracts many deep-pocketed golf fans, both individuals and corporate clients, who prefer to rent houses for the week, sometimes including household staffs who cook and clean while the tenants enjoy the tournament.
The Augusta Metro Chamber of Commerce oversees the Masters Housing Bureau, the only home-rental service sanctioned by Augusta National. Chamber President and CEO Sue Parr said business at the bureau is “not as brisk” as in past years, but homes are still in demand and inquiries still come in every day.
“We’ll probably keep getting inquiries right up until April, which is typically how that happens,” she said. “But certainly it’s hard to calibrate this year with very unusual circumstances.”
Prospective visitors still are looking at several travel and lodging options even as the tournament draws closer, rendering the situation “impossible” to judge where the market is or where it should be, Parr said. The scope of inquiries could change as the COVID-19 vaccination rate improves or if reports brighten from Europe, since Masters patrons visit from all over the world.
“It’s just an unusual year we’ve had here, but I think the community is prepared for whatever happens,” she said. “We’ll just take it one day at a time and I think we’ll have a great Masters Week.”
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