I played the new Ailsa about a year ago and I too thought it was very good - a significant improvement on the previous version. I really need to get around to doing a photo tour from the many pictures I took.
Rich, I read one report that suggested that his golf courses provide more than 40% of his revenues for the year, so their financial health is somewhat significant to him I would think.
When we were there last year, it was relatively busy and the green fees were certainly high enough to generate a fair income per player. On the other hand, at Trump Aberdeen, it was almost deserted when we drove by late in the day a couple of months ago.
Regarding the reports of revenues and losses, I'm not sure how much credence you can put in any of them. The Donald has been known to play fast and loose with the facts. Following are a couple of snippets from a recent Bloomberg article.
Trump has said he has poured 200 million British pounds ($265 million) into his Turnberry makeover. But his own general manager for the resort has contradicted him, saying in news interviews that the figure is closer to 140 million pounds ($185 million). Even that figure is artificially high because it represents investments Trump has pledged, not what he has actually spent. And, by the way, that figure is padded to begin with because it also includes Trump’s purchasing price for the property.
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His disclosure form last year, for example, pegged the president’s income from Turnberry at $14.5 million. Trump’s most recent disclosure, filed in May, showed Turnberry generating $20.4 million in income for the president in 2017. The financial disclosure forms Trump has filed in Scotland don’t suggest that Trump would be able to pull in that kind of money from either course given their modest revenue streams and annual losses.
Bloomberg News reporters have previously noted that earlier financial disclosure forms filed by the president suffered from similar problems. When they asked Trump in early 2016 about discrepancies appearing in those records, he told them that the U.S. forms — which are unaudited and simply rely on the president’s own assessment of his holdings — weren’t meant to convey actual earnings but, instead, “projected future income.”