A tool for seeing all tee times in an area

[jpro]

I've been working on a project that I want to run by you guys. I hope this doesn't fall into any sort of advertisement like rule - just to be clear there are no ads/revenue generation on this project at the moment. 

The background is I've always been the guy in my group who finds the tee times, sends out the times to everyone, gets people to commit, and finally books the round. I do this every week. I was getting frustrated with how many different courses I'd have to check before I could finally find a few open tee times after work. Particularly in the past 2 years with COVID it's gotten ridiculous to where I'm checking 10 courses for tee times before I find a few. At first I figured somebody must have solved this in some way but nope, there's only stuff like GolfNow and they don't have any of the courses my group plays. Maybe that's unique to my area but I suspect it's not entirely.

I'm a programmer and I have some background in automation so I was thinking okay I could definitely write a bot to do this and I came up with something that's been extremely useful to me personally.

Here's a picture of the prototype:



(if you care to see it in action I've got it hosted at https://teewatch.com/teeTimes/location/Minnesota/Minneapolis?date=2021-10-01)

You can basically see the current state of all the course tee sheets in your area. The higher the bar on the graph the more tee times are available during that hour. I don't have any special deals with these places so I just link to their regular booking site.

I'm trying to decide if this is actually something that's useful to a larger amount of people or if most people just book at the same place every week to where a comparison site is not all that useful. I figure the crew on GolfWRX will give me some honest feedback about whether I should keep plugging away at this and try to make something out of it. I could continue to add areas (right now it mostly just works in Minneapolis where I live), more filtering for number of players, tee time cost, etc.

[Roody]

Interesting. How are you accessing each club's tee sheets? Are they allowing you access to an API? 

[Bonneville85308]

This is really interesting to me. When I play in the afternoon and want a quick round, I scroll through golfnow, teeoff, and individual course tee sheets to find what course is basically the emptiest, then check the times at that course to make sure I'm not picking a time right after a lone foursome and that has a good buffer of open times in front of it. Most of the time I either call the course to book or just show up after viewing this info, so golfnow, etc. don't make anything from me.

 

Do you envision charging for the use of such an app, or having it pay for itself via ads?

Edited October 2, 2021 by Bonneville85308

[jpro]

13 hours ago, Bonneville85308 said:

This is really interesting to me. When I play in the afternoon and want a quick round, I scroll through golfnow, teeoff, and individual course tee sheets to find what course is basically the emptiest, then check the times at that course to make sure I'm not picking a time right after a lone foursome and that has a good buffer of open times in front of it. Most of the time I either call the course to book or just show up after viewing this info, so golfnow, etc. don't make anything from me.

 

Do you envision charging for the use of such an app, or having it pay for itself via ads?

 

I was doing something similar with the caveat that none of my local courses are on golfnow or teeoff. The only courses on those sites are ones we rarely play. We tend to play municipal golf courses which I assume don't care about being promoted on aggregators. They have plenty of customers already and are run from community funds so perhaps less incentive to use those products. 

 

My system for finding tee times was I had all the courses we play at (5 we really like and then ~5 more in our second tier) bookmarked. I'd open each one on the day we wanted to play then start composing a really long text message with the courses/times available. This is a lot of clicking because each site you have to navigate to the date you'd like, there's no easy way to skip that step. Then scroll down to the times you'd like to play. This wasn't too bad pre 2020 but since COVID I'm finding many of these courses are completely booked so I am getting very deep into my list before I've got enough tee times to send off to my group. And then there's a discussion/back and forth and sometimes I have to do it all over again if someone in the group can't play a certain day. 

 

This was getting annoying so I built myself a personal tool to automate this process and it worked pretty well but it was just for me. I've been using it for months now with great success so I'm considering taking it more public so to speak. So with TeeWatch what it enables me to do is load up the day we want to play and instantly I see all the tee sheets for my area. It greatly reduces the amount of courses I need to check. I can see oh these 3 popular courses we like are all booked up, no need to check further. Then when I've decided to book one I get a link directly to the booking site so it's less tracking/clicks. At some point I'd even like to have a "Share" functionality where you can send out options to your group, maybe with a poll or something. I envision this as the ultimate tool for organizing your weekly foursome.

 

It doesn't handle everything of course. If you popped onto the site you'd probably notice that completing a reservation is something I have no part in. I have no special deal/relationship with these courses so the booking is handled in the usual way, i.e. you are given a link to the course booking site to finish the process. 

 

That brings me to your second question of how might this thing make revenue or at least pay for the costs of hosting. It's an interesting question I don't yet have a full answer to. The whole point is to gather every publicly available tee sheet and present it in a consumable way. A lot of existing tee time searches don't show that many courses because they have no incentive to show you a tee time if they aren't going to get paid in some way. Since the core of the idea is not to exclude any courses the revenue model I think needs to rely on some other means whether that be some special feature set that is paid for directly or advertisements. Ads in the form of affiliate links are the easiest thing for me to implement quickly but I also don't want it to become bothersome. I have some other thoughts like maybe courses would be interested in paying a finder's fee to be promoted, essentially selling them the "lead" of a group wanting to play a golf course in their area. Realistically if this were to be workable from a business perspective I assume I'd need to use a few or all of these options in an intelligent way.

 

I hope that answers the present questions. This is a new project and I'm still feeling out exactly where it fits in the space of golf.

Edited October 2, 2021 by jpro
Typo

[Shushwap]

Interesting.. I like the idea..as i am the one in my group that does all the booking and texting 

Since covid hit it's become a real pain in the a** to find tee times 

[sabram]

Nice work. To be the most helpful for me, I'd like to (i) have the ability to see the dozen or so courses I most often play (ii) see how many player spots are open for each listed tee time as I sometimes book for four players, two players or for myself as a single) and (iii) the green fee for each tee time

[jpro]

On 10/2/2021 at 11:50 AM, sabram said:

Nice work. To be the most helpful for me, I'd like to (i) have the ability to see the dozen or so courses I most often play (ii) see how many player spots are open for each listed tee time as I sometimes book for four players, two players or for myself as a single) and (iii) the green fee for each tee time

 

I've recently added the ability to drill down into the hours to see what tee times are in there. It looks like this:

 

 

In other news I recently completed a first round of indexing the entire United States' golf courses, so the site should be usable for anyone now. TeeWatch now has over 2,000 golf courses it can find tee times for. Please check it out and leave me feedback here - I'd love to know how I can improve on this idea. It's certainly been extremely useful for me booking my rounds this summer and I'm hopeful it can be useful to others.

[TeeAreNY]

@jpro This is a really cool project. I'm assuming you are limited to certain API's that golf courses use as their booking systems. I checked out my local courses and the ones that are missing all have systems that require account logins to view the tee sheet. Regardless, the way the data is visually laid out is super handy and easy to view if you are looking for a course that isn't crowded. 

[sabram]

1 hour ago, jpro said:

I've recently added the ability to drill down into the hours to see what tee times are in there. It looks like this:

THat looks great. I'll check out the site this weekend

[kidcardio]

Like Kayak?

[jpro]

31 minutes ago, TeeAreNY said:

@jpro This is a really cool project. I'm assuming you are limited to certain API's that golf courses use as their booking systems. I checked out my local courses and the ones that are missing all have systems that require account logins to view the tee sheet. Regardless, the way the data is visually laid out is super handy and easy to view if you are looking for a course that isn't crowded. 

 

I appreciate it! Yes I am somewhat limited in that there are no APIs so I can only show what's publicly accessible for the time being. That said, a great deal of courses do have their tee sheets available without a login so I can show quite a lot of courses once I've gotten them configured. I've actually been surprised just how many courses there are within 25 miles of me - many I've never even heard of. Getting a course setup on TeeWatch sometimes take a bit of manual configuration due to lack of consistency in how courses setup their websites. If you let me know where you're located I can see if I can add more courses for the area. To date I've discovered approximately 11,000 US golf courses that are likely to accept public tee times and I've been able to configure about 20% of them so there's a lot still out there!

 

24 minutes ago, kidcardio said:

Like Kayak?

 

Kayak would be akin to what exists currently - a point of sale that shows you a wide variety of hotels/flights they have hooked into their system. They receive some kind of kickback when you book through them. TeeWatch is more of an indexer/visualization/search engine for tee times - it doesn't actually sell tee times or have any special deal with the golf courses. It's just indexing what is out there and then presenting it in a more readable and condensed format so you can find what you're looking for faster. It's more akin to Google but specifically for golf course tee times.

[TeeAreNY]

@jpro No worries, your system actually covered a lot of the courses in the area. The only ones missing are those with logins required to view and refuse to go on GolfNow, TeeOff, EZLinks or some other common system. Are you able to automatically program the directory from GolfNow? I noticed there was one local course that is on GolfNow that you didn't have on there. Also, a minor UI formatting I noticed but after about 10 course results there are courses that get grouped (screenshot below)

Edited October 14, 2021 by TeeAreNY

[jpro]

26 minutes ago, TeeAreNY said:

@jpro No worries, your system actually covered a lot of the courses in the area. The only ones missing are those with logins required to view and refuse to go on GolfNow, TeeOff, EZLinks or some other common system. Are you able to automatically program the directory from GolfNow? I noticed there was one local course that is on GolfNow that you didn't have on there. Also, a minor UI formatting I noticed but after about 10 course results there are courses that get grouped (screenshot below)

 

Thanks for the report! Yeah I've seen this happen a few times when a larger entity (in this case Essex County) consolidates all their times into a single booking page. I've fixed it so it should look right going forward.

[jpro]

Update: I've added another thousand courses over the prior week - up to some 3,000 courses across the US now. I think most areas, especially metro areas, should have a significant amount of courses to compare against now. I know in my home town of Minneapolis I can see some 25+ courses, some of which I wasn't even aware of.

 

I'm still using this weekly (at least until it freezes up around here) to find the best tee time for my weekly group, try it out and let me know what you think.

[Imp]

So if all the courses listed are not showing anything (hilton head area) then... all full? Or it's not pulling in the data as expected?

[jpro]

Thanks for the report! Was a misconfiguration for that area which I've fixed now.

[jdl]

Interesting tool, has to be a ton of maintenance work, no? Seems like many of the courses near me are frequently changing the online tee time service they use because it always seems like I have to create a new account or get a password reset. But nice work, looks very good.

[jpro]

On 10/22/2021 at 12:12 PM, jdl said:

Interesting tool, has to be a ton of maintenance work, no? Seems like many of the courses near me are frequently changing the online tee time service they use because it always seems like I have to create a new account or get a password reset. But nice work, looks very good.

 

Absolutely, but much of it can be automated. And I'm building tools to build, curate, and maintain TeeWatch’s course inventory as I go. Just today I added some tooling to view logs of tee time retrieval which made it possible to add quite a few stability improvements to that process. 

 

In other news I've been able to add another thousand courses bringing the total to over 4,200 courses. Hope you all are finding it useful in finding weekly rounds.

Edited October 25, 2021 by jpro

[TimGru]

Wow this is awesome! Thanks for putting in

the time to make it happen - it just made my life searching for tee times so much easier and delighted to see some Minneapolis courses in your example.

[nicelife]

@jproI’m beyond impressed. There is money in this project. I look for forward to seeing this become successful. Thank you for giving us this tool.

[CDM]

Very impressive.  Checked Denver and did very well.  The Denver City and County courses did not show tee times but online there was, that noted they an odd system. 

[jpro]

Appreciate the kind words. It's motivating to see other people are finding this useful. Only a few more rounds in the year left for me but plenty more to do on this site over winter. I'm currently discussing with some of the providers to see if they'd be interested in hooking me up with an API to pull tee times directly. With access to more data and reliability I have some thoughts about more ways to narrow in on relevant tee times. I would love to pull off some of the visualizations/navigations you see on Google Flights / kayak / expedia / etc. but for tee times. 

 

8 minutes ago, CDM said:

Very impressive.  Checked Denver and did very well.  The Denver City and County courses did not show tee times but online there was, that noted they an odd system. 

 

And reports like this are helpful as well. I was able to fix a number of courses for the Denver area.

[Sons_of_Pitches]

Great tool and seems to work well for the Las Vegas, NV area.  Thanks for the tool!

[SGL]

Awesome, I clicked on it thinking it would be cool tool to use, hopefully it works in Minneapolis, then bam its all my local courses.

[jpro]

It's been a busy few weeks improving TeeWatch. I've added a few niceties like a report functionality, getting the browser location for search, and improving the data intake process. But the real focus over this time has been improving the experience of browsing over several days. As a result, you'll immediately notice how much faster tee times load; no longer does every page need to slowly spin while data is gathered. As a side benefit I now have a lot more data cached which will open up some interesting possibilities. I should soon be equipped to aggregate a week's worth of tee times which I'm very excited about as I think that will make narrowing in on your perfect weekly tee time even better. 

Edited November 8, 2021 by jpro

[jpro]

The work continues. I have cleaned up my data enough that I can now reliably filter the player counts on the available tee times. I'm also doing some sorting to narrow down the results. The amount of courses I'm able to serve is on par or greatly exceeds any other aggregator - and if it doesn't in a specific area you can tell me and I'll bet I can fix that quickly. The golf season is pretty much over so it's full steam ahead working on making this the best tee time finder available.

 

[eacsgolferdad]

This is a great tool. Thanks for making it available to us on Golfwrx.
 

I searched in my area to test it out. Found a lot of available tee times at courses in the area. I noticed that the last 4-6 courses on the list didn’t show any available tee times. When I looked on the course website one had no availability and one is doing weekend shotgun starts for the rest of the season. Several others did have availability though. Home is north of Boston, MA.  Sadly season is almost over here too. Thanks again will definitely use this tool next year.

[parkleo]

I know we don't want to overrun the traffic to some of these sites to pull the data. However, is there a way to get a 3times a day update? Morning, mid day and at night? Just tyring to find a way to narrow down the tee times a bit more. Example from the phoenix area we have some over 1d old.

[jpro]

On 11/13/2021 at 9:08 PM, eacsgolferdad said:

This is a great tool. Thanks for making it available to us on Golfwrx.
 

I searched in my area to test it out. Found a lot of available tee times at courses in the area. I noticed that the last 4-6 courses on the list didn’t show any available tee times. When I looked on the course website one had no availability and one is doing weekend shotgun starts for the rest of the season. Several others did have availability though. Home is north of Boston, MA.  Sadly season is almost over here too. Thanks again will definitely use this tool next year.

 

Hey I really appreciate the report. I was able to track down an issue and get the Boston area updating better.

 

5 minutes ago, parkleo said:

I know we don't want to overrun the traffic to some of these sites to pull the data. However, is there a way to get a 3times a day update? Morning, mid day and at night? Just tyring to find a way to narrow down the tee times a bit more. Example from the phoenix area we have some over 1d old.

 

I have an enhancement planned to build in more intelligence to how often a check is needed. For courses where there's frequent changes I could imagine checking 2-3 times per day - others where the times don't change very much and they could be checked less frequently. This is definitely something I hope to roll out soon 👍

[jpro]

Hello all - I recently added the ability to see all of the tee times for a golf course in a calendar view. This would be very handy if you really just want to play a specific course and have several days you could play on. I have more plans for this course page, so stay tuned. 

 

Picture for the calendar: