A seven-venue pilot has become a nationwide rollout. Family Entertainment Group (FEG), a designer and operator of location-based entertainment experiences, has formalized a strategic partnership with Topgolf to bring customized arcade and interactive entertainment programming to all 94 of the golf-entertainment brand's U.S. venues. The phased expansion marks one of the more significant hospitality-entertainment integrations in the experiential dining and venue sector this year.
What FEG Brings
FEG's model goes beyond simply placing machines on a floor. The Itasca, Illinois-based company works alongside venue partners to map guest demographics, brand identity, and operational workflows before designing an entertainment mix intended to complement — rather than compete with — the primary experience. The company draws on more than two decades of work across hotels, resorts, casinos, and cruise lines, integrating attraction planning, merchandising strategy, marketing support, technology deployment, and data-driven performance optimization into a single managed program.
For Topgolf, whose venues already anchor a dwell-time-heavy, food-and-beverage-forward guest experience, layering in curated arcade attractions creates additional revenue touchpoints and extends engagement beyond the hitting bays. That kind of ancillary entertainment integration is increasingly on operators' radar as hospitality venues look for ways to drive per-visit spend without expanding footprints.
The Operator Angle
Rex Jackson, Chief Executive Officer of Family Entertainment Group, framed the deal around strategic alignment rather than a transactional vendor relationship. "Topgolf wasn't looking for a vendor," Jackson said. "They were looking for a partner who understands how entertainment can strengthen a destination, reinforce a brand, and create measurable business value."
That framing is meaningful for foodservice and hospitality operators evaluating entertainment as a revenue lever. FEG's pitch — that entertainment programs should be built around a partner's existing guest journey rather than grafted onto it — reflects a broader shift in how multi-experience venues approach ancillary revenue. Restaurant and entertainment hybrid operators have increasingly found that intentional curation of non-F&B experiences can lift overall check averages and repeat visitation when the programming feels native to the brand rather than opportunistic.
The Topgolf partnership also signals growing appetite among large-format hospitality venues to outsource entertainment operations to specialists rather than manage them in-house. FEG's managed-services model — covering everything from attraction selection to ongoing merchandising and marketing — reduces the operational burden on venue teams while maintaining brand consistency across dozens of locations.
With 94 venues now in scope and a pilot already validating the concept across seven locations, the rollout gives FEG one of its largest single-partner deployments to date and establishes a replicable blueprint for similar entertainment-anchored hospitality brands.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
