Enhancing the Fan Experience at the PGA Championship

The official PGA Championships Mobile App is the digital hub for fans of the 2025 PGA Championship, Senior PGA Championship, and KPMG Women’s PGA Championship. Available on both the App Store and Google Play, the app offers a comprehensive and interactive experience tailored for both on-site spectators and remote fans. 

CapTech’s Data-Driven Fan Experience (DDFX) solution centralized disparate data sources into a coherent, actionable interface that unlocks new opportunities to produce the attending fan experience.  With real-time geo-location fan movement, event producers were able to identify when to send timely information to fans throughout the day. This enabled the PGA to deliver a personalized, engaging experience for fans onsite through the PGA Championship Mobile App – something the PGA knew was increasingly important to fans.  

As fans traveled to the course, they were greeted with utility-based push notifications, helping them plan their day with the interactive map or get questions answered through the AI-powered virtual assistant. Depending on how fans traveled to the course, timely reminders were sent to rideshare or shuttle travelers, alerting them to book a ride or notify them when the last shuttle departed, all of which helped fans plan for a smooth exit. These fan journey-aligned push notifications performed remarkably well, achieving four times greater engagement than typically scheduled alerts.

The DDFX platform provided the Championship operations team with a new interactive user interface that visualized fan movement and concession sales through dynamic heatmaps. Championship directors were able to track fan movement across the course and access ticket entry scans to assess crowd size, in addition to monitoring beverage sales at all concession locations—all within a centralized location. 

Whether observing crowd dynamics as top golfers converge on pivotal spots like the 10th Tee and 18th Green or pinpointing popular gathering areas to deploy resources, PGA can leverage this detailed fan behavior data for future Championships, planning infrastructure and identifying amenities that ensure fans have the best possible experience on course. 

With our DDFX services, PGA leveraged real-time fan behavior to identify premium timeslots to increase engagement when sending sponsor push notifications. During Saturday afternoon at the Championship, fans walking on the front-nine who had not been to a particular sponsorship activation on the back nine, received a push notification encouraging them to stop by the sponsor’s location to cool off and grab a drink. This performed very well, with 58.4% of fans who received the notification walking to the sponsor’s location to purchase a drink. This clearly demonstrated that using real-time data to understand fan movement can help sponsors and event planners meet fans where they are in their journey, increasing revenue in the process. 

Our DDFX services, when powered by AI (DDFX.AI), demonstrate the power of pairing CapTech sports technologists with predictive analytics for driving smarter decision-making – enabling sports and entertainment venues to personalize fan experiences, optimize operations, and monetize revenue opportunities. Integrating Agentic AI combined with CapTech’s Adept solution, the DDFIX.AI model can forecast demand patterns for concessions and merchandise, identify trends in fan behavior to understand where they might go next, and interpret onsite activities at scale. By continuously refining these models, we can help event producers craft responses to dynamic situations, ensuring that fan interactions are efficient and timely, while increasing revenue potential for rights holders and sponsors.

The PGA Championship provided valuable insight to better understand fan behavior and unlocked new opportunities to identify how the data-driven fan experience can be realized across the sports and entertainment industry for any event, regardless of size or location.