I am a member at a Club Corp course in Aiken, South Carolina. There are plusses and minuses. One plus is an upgraded membership which means you can play the other courses in their portfolio, only paying cart fees. You can play each course twice a month. Club Corp just added TPC Piper Glen in Charlotte, and Firestone is also on the list. Of course you find some places, like Country Club of the South near Atlanta, have a cart fee of $30 per person so check before you assume you are going to spend $16 - $19. We have people that do golf trips to Palm Springs as they pay more for air fare but do eight rounds in sets of the two rounds at four places, like Indian Wells, rather than spend high green fees on a Pinehurst trip. I am not arguing for the quality of the courses but just referencing dollars.
The downside can be that your club is now following Club Corp directives rather than your old structure. Your pro shop may no longer have much say in what they charge for their merchandise. They may want to drop the price on a certain set of clubs to match local competitors but may no longer have the ability to do that. And your greenskeeper is not beholden to your membership but to Club Corp management. If they want to water the course to death to keep it green they will do that. We have some experience with that. They can also decide to spend $500,000 to upgrade your bar and put in a patio rather than put the money into the course. We have some experience with that too. I would say that they basically know what they are doing and the positives outweigh the negatives. And they are expanding a bit as you see so I would rather throw in with them than join an equity club. In this economy solvency is usually a good thing.