The toughest ticket in sports just added a sweet new perk.
A new hospitality offering named “Map and Flag” will debut at the Masters when the golf world returns to Augusta National in a little more than a month, the Sports Business Journal reported on Monday morning. The offering will provide a brand-new Masters experience to an unspecified number of fans for the nosebleed price of $17,000 for the week.
Map and Flag is the formal name for the hospitality project announced by Augusta National chairman Fred Ridley at his annual press conference last April. The project, which was developed on the former site of the Electrolux building across the street from the golf course’s entrance, will provide a series of premium food, drink and merchandise options, including a “food hall,” a sports bar and an outside garden and merchandise shop.
Map and Flag will be the second major hospitality offering for Masters visitors, following in the footsteps of Berckmans Place, which launched in 2013 and quickly became the gold standard of pro sports hospitality. Weekly tickets for Berckmans — a 90,000-square-foot facility located off the side of the 5th fairway — are sold primarily to club members and tournament sponsors for the reported cost of $6,000.
Map and Flag is the latest in a series of development projects for Augusta National after it spent years quietly vacuuming up real estate surrounding the golf course. Those real estate expansion efforts continue today, but have already resulted in considerable land gains for the club…and all manner of rumors about how it plans to use the new space. Luxury hospitality, long one of golf’s most profitable enterprises, represents a logical path to expansion for the Masters that doesn’t require considerably increasing tournament capacity. Other possible avenues of growth are the creation of additional merchandise centers (a new development is expected to open in April near the site of the par-3 course) and food and beverage locations.
Much like Berckmans, the buzzy new tournament hangout will add one more concentric circle of exclusivity to the event already regarded as the sports world’s most reclusive. Tournament badges sell on the secondary market for thousands, and tens of thousands of fans enter the tournament’s ticket lottery each year in the hopes of being granted the right to purchase a face-value badge for one or multiple tournament days. The unfortunate news for golf fans is that barring the club sharing photos of Map and Flag, it’s unlikely we’ll earn a glimpse into the new venue. As is tournament tradition, cell phones are banned from the premises of the new development, as is photography.
