Tee Time Booking Is About to Change. And That’s Good News for Public Golf Clubs.

For years, booking a tee time has been more complicated than it should be. Golfers jump between platforms, compare similar options, and often end up booking through whichever intermediary makes the process easiest at that moment. Clubs, in turn, give up margin and visibility, and over time the relationship with the golfer shifts away from the course itself.

That structure is now under pressure, largely because of how search and decision-making are changing online.

AI-driven tools are no longer limited to showing links or comparing options. Systems built into Google, voice assistants, and conversational agents like ChatGPT are increasingly designed to complete tasks on the user’s behalf. Instead of sending someone to a website, they gather availability, evaluate options, and execute the action directly.

Golf will not be an exception to this. A golfer will ask for an open tee time nearby, specify a time window or price range, and the system will check live availability across courses. Once a suitable option is identified, the booking will be completed immediately by the agent itself, without the golfer ever visiting a third-party marketplace or navigating multiple booking flows.

The critical detail is where that booking happens. These systems do not need to sit inside a marketplace to function. They work best when they can interact directly with the source of truth, which in golf is the club’s own tee sheet. When availability and pricing are accessible and reliable, the agent can book straight into the course’s system. No intermediary is required to take a cut, control the relationship, or repackage the inventory.

That shift fundamentally changes the economics

For years, public courses were pushed into competing on platform placement, commissions, and visibility inside someone else’s ecosystem. In an agent-driven booking environment, those advantages matter far less. What matters instead is whether the course’s tee sheet is accurate, pricing is clear, and the booking can be executed cleanly at the source. And this is where public golf courses are well positioned.

Most third-party booking platforms only create value when they control discovery and execution. When AI agents handle discovery themselves and execute bookings directly against the club’s own system, that middle layer becomes optional rather than essential. Golfers get speed and simplicity, while courses retain control, pricing power, and the full value of the transaction.

Responding to this shift does not require rebuilding everything or chasing new technology for its own sake. It requires getting the fundamentals right. Tee time inventory needs to be accurate and accessible. Rates need to be consistent and understandable. The booking path needs to work cleanly when initiated by a system, not just a human clicking through a website. The same thing happened when the internet first became mainstream: companies didn’t need to reinvent their business, but they did need to make sure they could be found and understood online. The parallel with AI is similar. Courses don’t need to “do AI,” they simply need to make sure their tee sheet can be read, interpreted, and acted on reliably.

When those conditions are met, the direction the market is heading works clearly in favor of the course. Bookings become more direct, margins improve, and the relationship with the golfer stays where it belongs. This is not a distant future scenario. It is a structural change already underway, enabled by AI, that brings tee time booking closer to how it should have worked all along.

Teemu
Founder
Growth Golf & Country Club
Miami, FL, USA