Your club charges $350 for a visitor green fee. The golfer pays, plays, leaves happy. Simple transaction. Good revenue.
But here's the question nobody asks: what did it cost the club to process that booking?
Not the cost of maintaining the course. Not the pro shop overheads. The admin cost. The human time spent turning an enquiry into a confirmed tee time. We mapped the entire workflow at several premium private clubs, stopwatch in hand, and the answer is genuinely startling.
Not the booking itself — the administration of the booking. The emails, the verification, the tee sheet juggling, the payment wrangling, the confirmation sending.
Twenty-two minutes. Per booking. Every single time.
For a club processing 400 visitor rounds a year — a modest number for any course in the top 100 — that's 146 hours of staff time. Nearly a full month of work, forty hours a week, dedicated entirely to booking administration. For a busier club doing 700 or 800 rounds? You're looking at 250+ hours. That's someone's entire job for three months of the year, spent on a process that hotels automated before the iPhone existed.
Let's break down where that time actually goes.
The seven-step visitor booking workflow
We sat with booking coordinators at several clubs and documented the process step by step. While no two clubs are identical, the pattern is remarkably consistent. Here's what a typical premium club visitor booking looks like:
Step 1: The enquiry arrives (1–2 minutes)
A visitor emails the club. Or calls. Or fills in a web form that generates an email. Or, in one memorable case, sends a message via Instagram that gets forwarded to the pro shop, who forwards it to the office, who prints it out. The enquiry includes some combination of requested dates, number of players, and sometimes a handicap certificate. Sometimes it includes none of these things and just says "We'd love to play your course in March."
Staff open the enquiry, read it, and begin figuring out what they're working with.
Step 2: Credential verification (3–5 minutes)
This is where it gets interesting. Premium private clubs don't just take bookings — they verify that visitors meet their playing requirements. That means checking handicap certificates (often scanned PDFs of varying quality), confirming the visitor's home club affiliation, and in some cases reviewing a letter of introduction from their club secretary.
For international visitors, this gets substantially more complex. Handicap systems vary by country. Documentation formats differ. Time zones mean that verification calls to home clubs happen at inconvenient hours or not at all. One operations manager told us she keeps a folder of handicap certificate formats from twelve different countries so she can tell the legitimate ones from the forgeries. (Yes, people forge handicap certificates. Golf is a strange sport.)
Step 3: Tee sheet cross-referencing (2–3 minutes)
Now the staff member opens the tee sheet — often in a completely separate system from the one they received the email in — and checks availability for the requested dates. If the visitor asked for a specific time, that's a quick lookup. If they asked for "sometime in the morning on a Tuesday in March," it becomes a judgement call about when to slot them in around member play, competitions, course maintenance, and existing bookings.
This step often involves checking with the pro shop or Director of Golf about whether a particular time is genuinely available or just technically open on the system.
Step 4: The back-and-forth (3–5 minutes across multiple touchpoints)
The staff member replies to the visitor with available times. The visitor responds — sometimes immediately, sometimes three days later, sometimes with a follow-up question about cart availability, dress code, or whether they can book the composite course instead. Another email. Another response. A confirmation of the chosen time.
The 3–5 minutes here is the cumulative staff time across what might be four or five separate email exchanges over several days. Each one requires the staff member to re-open the enquiry, recall the context, check the tee sheet again (because availability may have changed), and compose a reply.
For international visitors in different time zones, this exchange can stretch across a week.
Step 5: Payment processing (3–5 minutes)
Here's where things get properly antiquated. At many premium clubs, payment is processed manually. The visitor provides credit card details — sometimes over email (a security concern nobody wants to talk about), sometimes over the phone (requiring the visitor to call during Australian business hours, which is entertaining if they're calling from Texas at 2am local time), and occasionally via a PDF form that gets printed, manually entered, and filed.
The staff member enters the payment into the club's financial system — often a separate platform from both the email system and the tee sheet. If the club uses a system like Northstar, this means creating a credit entry, generating an ID, and manually cross-referencing it with the booking.
Step 6: Confirmation and documentation (2–3 minutes)
A confirmation email is composed and sent to the visitor. It typically includes the confirmed date and time, green fee amount, any conditions of play, directions to the club, dress code reminders, and contact details for the day. Some clubs have templates for this. Many don't.
The booking is then noted on the tee sheet, the financial entry is reconciled, and any internal notes are added for the pro shop team who'll be greeting the visitor on the day.
Step 7: Day-of re-verification (1–2 minutes)
When the visitor arrives, the pro shop or front desk re-checks their credentials. Handicap certificate? Home club affiliation? Appropriate attire? This is often a repeat of Step 2, because the information from the original booking doesn't always travel cleanly to the point of arrival.
Adding it up: the annual cost
The maths is simple but the result is sobering.
At 22 minutes per booking, a club processing 400 visitor rounds per year spends 146 hours on booking administration. At 600 rounds, it's 220 hours. At 800 rounds, it's 293 hours.
To put that in context: 146 hours is 3.6 full working weeks. It's the equivalent of your booking coordinator spending nearly a month doing nothing but processing visitor enquiries — answering emails, verifying handicaps, entering payment details, and sending confirmation templates.
But the true cost is worse than the raw hours suggest, because of three multipliers that rarely get factored in.
The context-switching penalty. Visitor booking admin doesn't happen in a single block. It's scattered throughout the day — an email at 9:15, a follow-up at 11:40, a payment call at 2pm. Each interaction requires the staff member to stop what they're doing, recall the booking context, find the right email thread, and re-engage. Research on task-switching consistently shows that fragmented work takes 20–40% longer than batched work. That 22-minute average would be closer to 15 minutes if the work was consolidated. It isn't.
The opportunity cost. Those 146 hours aren't free hours. They're hours that could be spent on member experience, event coordination, course presentation, or any of the hundred other things a club's operations team never has enough time for. Every minute spent transcribing a credit card number from a phone call is a minute not spent on something that actually improves the club.
The error rate. Manual data entry across multiple disconnected systems introduces errors. A booking coordinator entering 400 payment records per year across three different platforms — email, tee sheet, financial system — will make mistakes. Transposed digits on a credit card. A booking entered on the wrong date. A visitor who arrives to find their tee time wasn't actually confirmed. These errors cost time to fix, create friction with visitors, and occasionally cost the club money.
The cross-industry comparison that should embarrass us
Hotels figured out online booking in 2005. Airlines were processing millions of self-service reservations before most of us had smartphones. Restaurants cracked the reservation problem by 2015 — OpenTable, Resy, and dozens of others made it possible to book a table at a Michelin-starred restaurant in about ninety seconds, including choosing your preferred table position.
And yet: premium golf clubs in 2026 are still processing visitor bookings via email chains, phone calls during business hours, and PDF forms that require the visitor to physically scan a document and attach it to a message.
The contrast isn't subtle. A golfer planning a trip to play one of the world's top 100 courses can book their international flight in four minutes on their phone, reserve a hotel room with two taps, and make dinner reservations at three restaurants before they finish their morning coffee. Then they need to play a round of golf, and suddenly they're sending an email to a generic address and waiting three days for someone to get back to them.
This isn't a criticism of the staff doing the work. They're doing a remarkable job with inadequate tools. It's a question for the people who buy those tools: why has the golf industry accepted a standard of technology that every adjacent industry abandoned years ago?
What "good" actually looks like
We're not here to prescribe specific solutions — that's a different article — but it's worth outlining what a modern visitor booking workflow should involve, because the bar is genuinely not that high.
The visitor applies online. A form or booking platform that captures all required information upfront: dates, player details, handicap verification, and payment. Available 24/7, in the visitor's timezone, on their phone. The enquiry doesn't generate an email chain — it generates a structured booking request that staff can review at a glance.
Verification happens automatically or semi-automatically. Handicap data is pulled from national databases where possible, rather than requiring visitors to scan paper certificates. Home club verification is handled digitally, not via phone calls. International credentials are validated against known formats. Staff intervene only when something flags as unusual.
The club approves with a click. A dashboard — not an inbox — shows all pending booking requests with verified credentials, requested dates, and tee sheet availability side by side. Staff approve or offer alternative times without leaving the screen. No toggling between systems. No re-entering data.
Payment is processed digitally at time of booking. The visitor pays when they book, through a secure payment flow. No card numbers over the phone. No PDF forms. No manual entry into a separate financial system. The payment lands, the booking confirms, and the visitor receives an automated confirmation with everything they need for their visit.
That's not science fiction. That's how every other hospitality industry works. It's how most of us book everything else in our lives. The question isn't whether golf can get there — it's why it hasn't yet.
The bottom line
If your club processes 400 visitor bookings a year, your team is spending roughly 146 hours — nearly four full working weeks — on administration that could be handled in a fraction of the time with the right systems. At 800 bookings, you're looking at seven weeks.
Those hours are real. They represent staff time, operational capacity, and member experience that's being quietly consumed by a process that most other industries automated a decade ago.
The first step is knowing the number. Now you know it.
The second step is deciding what you'd do with those hours back.