Comment by scoofy
1 day ago
>Golfnow offers a service that courses must value
Yes, obviously, they have monopsony power because networks are natural monopolies. The problem is that they can extract rents because of that monopsony power... and they do.
Because it's convenient to have all buyers operating through a single network, that network has the ability to extract rents from the sellers. It should be trivially illegal to operate such a site in the US, given anti-trust laws, but we've decide in the last 40 years that we don't enforce anti-trust in the US anymore, so here we are.
The fact that sites like booking.com can charge hotels a commission of up to 25% per booking shows exactly the level of extractive power that a site this type of power, simply because they were the first to capture the monopolistic network. It doesn't matter that some of the smaller hotels and course will go out of business, even if customer as a whole are hurt, because the total market is more valuable to them by maximally extracting rents.
> Because it's convenient to have all buyers operating through a single network
I just don't see Golfnow as a "single network". I golf with a lot of people that have never heard of them. If a course isn't on Golfnow and I want to golf there, I still book with them however they want me to even though it's not as convenient.
Just like Booking.com has competition from Google, Google also makes it easy to find and link directly to any golf course to book.
I'm not saying you're wrong about some courses not liking them but I have a hard time understanding why it's so hard for courses to just not deal with Golfnow and take bookings another way if they think it's so harmful.
Networks are natural monopolies. It’s no more complicated than that.
Obviously it is, because Golfnow is certainly not a monopoly.
There are small golf courses near me that don't use them and that's fine. Please don't shame the ones that do.
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