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Senior PGA tourney on par for $23.3 million impact
By Dennis Quick
Senior Staff Writer
Linda Malcolm, co-owner of Indigo Books, looks forward to the upcoming Senior PGA Championship at Kiawah Island’s Ocean Course. Malcolm’s bookshop is located in Johns Island’s Freshfields Village, a shopping center near the Kiawah Island entrance.
“We’re excited. We think a lot of visitors will drop in. Freshfields is an attraction, and there will be lots of activities, a lot for families to do and see,” she said.
The 2007 Senior PGA Championship is expected to generate a $23.3 million economic impact on the Lowcountry, according to a study conducted by the College of Charleston’s Office of Tourism and Analysis.
That hefty figure “is considered conservative because we didn’t include the spending of the media personnel and athletes,” said Bing Pan, a researcher with the Office of Tourism Analysis who helped produce the study.
The golf championship, which runs from May 22–27, has sold 80,000 tickets at a cost of $25 each. (Children age 17 and under get in for free if accompanied by an adult.) Malcolm anticipates that a good number of those ticket holders will wander from the greens and the fairways to Freshfields Village and into her bookstore.
Janet Sbihli, owner of Carolina Clay Gallery in Freshfields, says her pottery and sculpture gallery, featuring creations strictly from artists in the Carolinas, is getting ready for the big golf event.
“We’re adding new inventory, and we’re staying open late and offering wine and cheese. It’ll be fun,” Sbihli said, adding that she hopes out-of-towners will stop in her gallery and “take a bit of Carolina home with them.”
The economic impact includes direct spending by out-of-towners, who are expected to comprise at least 65% of the event’s ticket holders, $2 million worth of Professional Golfers’ Association of America expenditures and a “multiplier effect” in which the spending by visitors generates spending by hospitality and tourism employees serving them, Pan said.
The expected constant ringing of cash registers will be music to the ears of Freshfields Village’s 46 storeowners, said Elisa Cooper, Freshfields’ property manager.
“We’ve been planning this event since last summer. Stores are gearing up with additional merchandise and staffing,” Cooper said.
Freshfields activities will include a nightly outdoor concert on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, with a different band each night. The shopping center regularly holds outdoor concerts that typically draw between 300 and 350 people, Cooper said.
During the Memorial Day weekend, when the golf tournament is in full swing, 1,000 spectators are expected to attend the concerts each night. The event will help put Freshfields on the tourist-attraction map, she said.
And it will help put South Carolina on the world’s professional golfing map.
“The 2007 Senior PGA Championship marks the first time one of golf’s major championships (consisting of PGA, LPGA and Senior PGA events) will be played in South Carolina. As the Senior PGA’s championship event, it will feature the strongest field of the year, with many of the game’s all-time greatest players in the thick of the competition,” said Helen Hill, executive director of the Charleston Area Convention and Visitors Bureau.
“This landmark event will also be an exceptional business development opportunity for showcasing the state to existing and prospective clients,” Hill said.
The Charleston Regional Development Alliance also is looking forward to the event, said David Ginn, the Alliance’s president and CEO.
“We have secured a sky suite to entertain some of our targeted prospects for the weekend. We see this as a great opportunity to host some of our best prospects, considering our market for business investment,” Ginn said.
NBC and the USA cable network will televise the event to 70 countries, said PGA President Roger Warren, who is also president of the Kiawah Island Golf Resort.
“The TV exposure will reach an affluent television audience that matches with the Charleston tourism industry’s target market,” said John Crotts, director of the College of Charleston’s Department of Hospitality and Tourism.
Local hotels and motels are seeing hefty bookings. However, the increased business is due not only to the Senior PGA Championship but to college baseball’s Southern Conference championship tournament held during the same time as the PGA, plus the usual heavy tourism traffic during Memorial Day weekend, said Geoff Cipkala, president of the Greater Charleston Hotel and Motel Association.
“If we had another thousand rooms, we could fill them,” Cipkala said.
The Senior PGA Championship is South Carolina’s biggest professional golfing event since the 1991 Ryder Cup (considered a team contest rather than a major championship), which was also held on The Ocean Course at Kiawah Island.
The Ocean Course will be the site of the 2012 PGA Championship.
Dennis Quick is senior staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@charlestonbusiness.com.
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