Court hire rates--is badminton an expensive sport?

In general, badminton courts should be cheaper than Tennis, because they need less space.
However, badminton needs expensive mats and is played indoor, hence needs heating in cold or AC in warm regions. In commercial settings you also need somebody to accept money. This person will cost on average ~30€/hour, and during most times the hall is nowhere close to full (which it may be between 18:00 and 21:00 on weekdays).

In Germany, we have two popular systems:

Commercial halls cost about the same as in New Zealand, roughly between 5€ and 18€ per hour (including VAT), depending on day, time, and location. There is a person in the hall, and they often have mats. Often, it's cheaper to go to a general sports center, because there the person handling badminton may be shared with other sports.

Club halls are generally owned by the city, county, and/or schools. People pay per year, so nobody is being paid to supervise the hall.
Altogether, you pay roughly 0,30€-1,50€ per hour per year, although many players will only use a fraction of that.

 

That is impressive. So there is no employee physically present at the hall? How do they prevent somebody just playing without booking? Does this mean you can must always pay online?

Are you sure? Right now, google says the temperature in NZ is 12°C. Isn't that a bit cold to play?

If these clubs are non-profit, then you should be able to look at their books, shouldn't you? Surely the money must go somewhere.

 

$25 AUD/hr in Australia. No aircon/heating, no automatic booking system. It's pretty expensive yeah..

 

Perhaps the rate could go down if they can also get pickleball bookings. That is a sport that has elements of badminton, and is played on the same court, just with a lower net. One of the clubs I belong to have their own stadium, but pickleball play there too.

 

Here in my city court rental rate ranges from 1usd/hr to 4usd/hr....so far i can't find any court more expensive than that....there are cheaper than 1 usd but mostly unplayable for many reasons unless you're pure newb

You should move to indonesia

 

It's just what happens when badminton is a minority sport. In badminton dominant countries court hire is probably the least of the costs.

 

Say you pay them minimum wage; that is 18.90 NZD in money to the employee, so roughly 30 NZD/hour in total (you also have to pay taxes, insurance, costs to hire, pensions, etc.).

An employee has to open and close, somebody must operate a cash register at least some of the time, there is general maintenance and cleaning being done. You also probably want to loan rackets and make sure they return for beginners, introduce beginners to the rules (e.g. no dirty shoes on court), et cetera.
Let's say that an employee only needs to be present half the time (maybe there are times when only advanced players play, who all have a racket and very good manners.) At 12 hours open a day, this will cost you 6 · 350 hours / 30NZD/hour, which works out to 63k NZD.

The direct hall expenses (heating, water, toilet paper, cleaning utensils, repairs, equipment, total hall depreciation) are 64k NZD.

At 111k court hire income, you will have about 3k NZD cost for credit card processing. Even an online booking system has to be maintained and programmed by somebody, let's say that's 2k NZD. There are also general costs of operating even a non-profit, e.g. for this audit, financial management, a website, printers, and so on. Let's say we can get those down to 5k NZD.

Altogether, if you'd close down everything but the court hire, then this enterprise would cost 137k NZD/year. Even if you reduce the employee time to 25% of the time courts are open, then you'd still end up with 105k NZD/year. This is against 111k NZD/year of income.

Therefore, the hall could likely not be opened. Bear in mind that in some years, like 2020 because of COVID, you need significant reserves. This does not work unless you make a good profit in normal years. The court hire costs are absolutely appropriate.

You can calculate that the shop generates 29k NZD/year (sales - cost of sales). Honestly, you likely need somebody at the hall full-time anyways, so unless you need to hire additional people explicitly for the shop, having a shop is worth it.

Also, a shop and coaches enable badminton play and draw players. If you abandon everything but the raw court hire, it's much harder for people to start playing badminton, so the player base would dwindle over time, slashing your already insufficient income.

There is the open market: If you believe that badminton court hires are a rip-off, why don't you open your own center and split the profit between your customers and yourself? Even profiting from the existing center's coaches and badminton support infrastructure drawing new players, this looks to be quite hard. Maybe you can learn from the people who run squash courts at a significantly lower price.

 

To answer the question in the OP: I would say yes and no. It really depends what you call "expensive". I only played in Hong Kong and Germany. In Hong Kong I paid between 55-80 HKD for a session at my level, court booked, shuttles provided. I really loved it and the price was very decent, games were hard and challenging.

In Germany I pay 14€ per month for my club membership, can train 4 times per week and can get 8,5 hours per week.

I also booked courts at a sports center for 15€/h during the time my club was closed. IMO the price was also okay. If you don't do breaks over 1-2 minutes or chat long, the price is also reasonable. If I booked with 3 friends for 2 hours continous play, everybody paid 7,50€ court rent plus shuttles.

I also play at a chinese badminton group. The shuttle providers get a discount and the organizer count the used shuttles. Each shuttle means 1,50€, so I provided mostly 4 shuttles on a 2 hour session and paid 3,50€, but need to travel 90km. Games also always hard and challenging.

I personally think that it depends how much you are willing to spend for this kind of sport. If you don't collect expensive rackets and only play quality sessions, badminton is not expensive. I had a time in my life when I played as much as I could and this was expensive in relation to the quality of play.

It also depends how important badminton is to you. Since it has a huge and important part in my life, costs are always okay.

 

Yes, that would work; provided you could find at least 111 players subscribing under this scheme to keep the current revenue.

However, note that a flatrate means that players who play a lot are subsidized by those who only play once a week. Likely, your center doesn't have 111 dedicated players, but instead 20-50 really dedicated players who would profit from a flatrate, and hundreds of players who play only once a month on average. For the players who only play irregularly, paying 20$ per week doesn't make sense. Some players don't have enough money to pay 1000$/year, so you likely want reduced fees for low-income players.

Also, this makes it harder for people to get into badminton. If you're just getting started with a sport, you don't want to commit much, and 20$ (likely more since there are administrative costs if you subscribe just for one week) can be a hefty fee just to swing a racket for the first time.

In addition, with a flatrate you need to solve resource competition problems: What prevents me form joining the club and booking a court every hour of every day? What do you do if 80 of the 111 players show up at 6pm? When you pay by the hour, you can solve this problem by making it much cheaper to play when there are empty courts, and raising the prices during rush hour.

At the end of the day, to get cheaper badminton, you only have limited options:

1. Decrease costs (maybe you can volunteer to watch courts and handle the shop for 5 hours a week, and find some people who also do that on a volunteer basis?)
2. Shift the revenues among players, as with your flatrate model. This will be met with resistance by the people who will have to pay more.
3. Increase court usage. Maybe the center can offer you a cheaper price for low-demand times and/or mass booking? In Germany, it would not be uncommon to pay half of the normal price (which may be as low as 25% of the rush hour price) if you book a regular timeframe during low-demand hours.
   This also means that the more players play in your center, the cheaper it gets.
4. Scaling effects. Building and maintaining a 20-court center doesn't cost twice as much as a 10-court center.

 

But gyms are fundamentally different from badminton:

• In most nations, badminton is not as well-known as gyms. Badminton requires people to discover it.
• Most people generally start to go to the gym not to have fun, but because they want to lose weight or get stronger and lack the discipline to do that at home. From this perspective, it makes sense to bind yourself to a gym flatrate, so that you feel incentivized to go regularly. In contrast, badminton is entertainment for most players. You go to the courts because it's fun, not because you paid for it.
• There is more competition for badminton: It competes against basically any other sport. In contrast, the main competition for a gym is other gyms.
  
• Most people start to go to the gym at age 16-30, when they have sufficient funds but no dependents. In contrast, the majority of badminton players starts at age 7-16. In general, families (especially with many children) tend to have less money to spend.
• The limit of time to be in the gym tends to be much lower. Most people will be in a gym less than 10h/week. In contrast, 20h/week badminton is certainly doable.

I'm not saying that a flatrate can't work for badminton courts. In fact, as I wrote in my first post here, German clubs do have a flatrate model. But that works because

1. it's generally in school halls that exist anyways
2. halls are subsidized by city&state
3. low employee costs: apart from coaches, most jobs tend to be done by the community or volunteers

This makes the costs very affordable even for families: the standard fare tends to be around 100€-150€/year, and about half of that for kids or low-income households. Many clubs further subsidize large families.

Yes, please do! My impression is that squash played much more in adulthood than as a youth sport, but apart from that it should be very similar to badminton. Maybe you can get a similar cost/revenue overview from them?

There's your problem! Following this, it means the center is in severe trouble, as it is never fully used. Opening a center when there are no customers is a waste of money.

Since there are lots of empty court times, the center can certainly offer a flatrate, if only at the price you are currently paying on average.

But switching everybody to an expensive flatrate is probably a very bad idea, as it may lead to some (especially the lower-level) members leaving. But having many lower-level players is required to acquire new members.