Nobody in the Room Had Booked Their Own Tee Time

At the 2026 PGA Buying Summit in Frisco, Texas, I hosted an education session called “Take Control of Your Digital Story in an AI Age.” It was built for retailers, coaches, and operators, and most of the conversation stayed exactly where you’d expect — websites, AI search visibility, digital storytelling. Then an operator raised his hand with a question that stopped the room.

“We offer online tee times and have for years,” he said. “Why are the majority of my tee times still booked by telephone?”

The pitch nobody questioned

Here’s the honest answer, and it’s not a flattering one: because most of us in golf did exactly what the tech reps told us to do. For the better part of a decade, the pitch to course operators has been simple — offer online tee times, and the phone will stop ringing. It sounded like common sense. Golfers everywhere book flights, restaurants, and hotel rooms online without thinking twice. Golf should be no different.

Except almost nobody involved in that pitch — the vendors selling the booking engines, or the operators buying them — gave much thought to what it actually feels like for a golfer to use one. The industry treated “we have an online booking engine” as the finish line, not the starting point.

So I asked the room a follow-up question: “Who here has personally booked a tee time at their own facility, through their own booking engine, in the last three months?”

One hand went up. In a room full of the people responsible for that exact experience.

The gap that explains the phone calls

That single raised hand tells you almost everything about why golf shops are still buried in phone calls. It’s not that golfers refuse to book online. It’s that the people who run golf courses have largely stopped experiencing their own booking flow as a golfer would, which means nobody with the authority to fix it actually knows what’s broken.

I gave the room — and I’ll give you — the same homework. Tonight, book a tee time at your own course, on your own booking engine, the way a golfer actually would. Then sit with a few uncomfortable questions:

Can you log in with a Google ID? Most modern platforms — the ones your golfers use every single day — let you skip account creation entirely. If your booking engine still makes a golfer invent a new username and password, you’re adding friction your competitors for that golfer’s time and attention don’t have.

Do you have to agree to terms and conditions before you even see inventory? Think about how that reads to a golfer who just wants to know if 10:20 AM is open Saturday. You’re asking for a commitment before you’ve shown them anything worth committing to.

How many steps stand between “I want to play Saturday” and “confirmed”? Every extra screen, every extra field, every extra click is a moment where a golfer decides it’s faster to just call the shop.

The harder question

Once you’ve walked through your own booking flow, there’s a second, less comfortable question worth asking: do you push your booking engine vendor the way you’d push any other vendor supplying your operation?

Do you require performance reporting? Do you ask, on a regular schedule, for better features — the way you’d expect from a mower fleet, a POS system, or a food and beverage supplier? For most operators, the honest answer is no. The booking engine gets bought, installed, and largely left alone.

That’s the actual root of the problem, and it’s an industry-wide one, not a single-vendor one. Booking engine vendors invest where operators demand investment. If courses treat the booking engine as a solved problem rather than a piece of infrastructure that needs ongoing pressure and accountability, vendors have no incentive to keep improving it. Nothing changes, the experience stays clunky, and golfers keep reaching for the phone — not because they distrust technology, but because the technology in front of them hasn’t earned their trust.

Start with the phone in your own hand

You don’t need a committee, a vendor RFP, or a new budget line to start closing this gap. You need to do what almost nobody in that room at the PGA Buying Summit had done recently: sit down, pull out your phone, and book a tee time at your own course like a golfer would.

If it’s slow, confusing, or asks more of you than it should, that’s not a golfer problem. That’s a vendor conversation waiting to happen — and it starts with you actually knowing what you’re asking them to fix.