Some years ago I built a project to aggregate golf tee times. I still get the occasional message about it, which got me thinking about whether there's any interest in bringing something like this back.
The core problem is platforms like GolfNow only show a fraction of the public courses where I live. If I’m trying to find an after-work tee time, I end up bouncing between a bunch of individual course websites, which is kind of a pain.
My earlier project pulled all the available tee times together and showed them in a higher-level view, which made it much easier to quickly see what might work. There was definitely room to improve the idea though.
In the image I’ve linked, I’ve rethought it as a heatmap. The x-axis is time, the y-axis is day, and each cell shows how many tee times are available in a 30-minute window. You can filter down to just the courses, times, and days you care about and quickly narrow things down to a short list.
I’ve also been thinking about adding ways to share results with a group to coordinate plans, maybe even some lightweight voting.
by xjpro
8 Comments
I just call the course and see if the tee time is available
Although I’d love to have a better UX for finding times, If the courses aren’t putting their times up on Golfnow or one of the other sites, why would they put their tee times up on your site?
I joined a club and make tee times 15 days in advance
I have the same problem, and love this idea. Bravo.
Imagine if you could filter by courses too, leaving off certain tracts you wouldn’t consider that could mislead the heat map.
It’s definitely useful, as someone who bounces around Los Angeles randomly looking for times. That said, if you’re just scraping and aggregating, it’ll work but you’ll likely need to monetize in some form or fashion to keep this thing going. If you’re not working with courses that leaves membership or ads really. Personally wouldn’t mind ads on a site like this but that’s my take as someone who works in the ad industry lol
Realistically – you’ll need an integration with each course you want to pull data from, assuming that Tee Times are available. I imagine most courses use public systems, but some would be one offs. You’ll need to rely on web scraping, which makes those integrations fragile. And then get enough traffic to monetize it (with ads?). Doesn’t seem worth the squeeze even using LLMs to minimize integration work.
You’d wanna think about a mobile view, too. Probably 60% of your booking traffic will be mobile
How come courses don’t have better tee time management software or better payment systems?
Genuinely asking