Let’s start with a thought experiment.
Imagine you’re hiring a new front-of-house manager. They walk in on day one, sit down at the computer, and you say: “Right, so to check today’s bookings you’ll need to navigate three menus, scroll past a screen that hasn’t been updated since the Gillard government, and then cross-reference with this separate spreadsheet because the system doesn’t talk to our payment processor.”
They’d think you were joking. Then they’d update their LinkedIn profile during lunch.
This is not a hypothetical. This is a Monday morning at hundreds of golf clubs in Australia, the UK, and beyond. The $100 billion global golf industry — a sector that caters to a customer base with above-average disposable income and above-average expectations for service — is running its daily operations on technology that would embarrass a mid-tier pizza chain.
And the strange thing is, most of us have just accepted it.
The gap is real, and it’s growing
Let’s put this in context. The hospitality industry — hotels, restaurants, events — has spent the last decade undergoing a genuine technology revolution. Property management systems went cloud-native. Restaurant booking moved from phone-and-paper to OpenTable, then to integrated platforms like SevenRooms that manage the entire guest journey from reservation to post-visit marketing. Payment processing became seamless. Dynamic pricing became standard. AI concierges started answering hotel phone lines. Mobile check-in went from novelty to expectation.
According to industry research, 78% of hotel chains are already using AI in some capacity, and 89% plan to expand those use cases within two to three years. Contactless check-in and mobile guest services are now the top two technologies travellers want hotels to maintain permanently. The hospitality sector has its problems — staffing crises, tight margins, legacy system integration headaches — but a lack of technological ambition isn’t one of them.
Now look at golf.
The dominant tee sheet software in Australia was founded in 2000. Its interface, by the charitable admission of its own users, looks like it belongs to a different era. The dominant platform in the UK gives clubs their tee sheet for “free” in exchange for surrendering a tee time every day to a third-party marketplace. Several of the largest global platforms are owned by private equity firms or media conglomerates whose incentives don’t always align with making the club administrator’s Tuesday morning easier.
One experienced club operator — someone managing 10+ courses globally — put it bluntly: they’ve been doing this for over 15 years and still haven’t found a platform that can properly manage golf cart scheduling, let alone everything else they’re trying to do throughout the day.
Golf technology isn’t just a bit behind hospitality. It’s a full decade behind. And the gap is widening.
How did we get here?
This didn’t happen because golf club administrators are technologically illiterate. It happened because of a very specific set of structural conditions that created the perfect environment for software stagnation.
The market was too small to attract serious investment for too long. Golf course management software is a niche within a niche. For most of the 2000s and 2010s, the total addressable market wasn’t large enough to attract the calibre of venture capital and product talent that flooded into restaurant tech, hotel tech, and broader hospitality platforms. The companies that did build golf software were often bootstrapped operations that got to “good enough” and stayed there — because their customers had no alternatives putting pressure on them to improve.
Incumbent monopolies killed competitive pressure. In Australia, one platform controls more than half the market. In the UK and Ireland, another dominates through a model that makes switching feel risky. When a vendor has 50–70% market share in a geography, the urgency to innovate drops dramatically. Why redesign the interface when your customers have nowhere else to go? Why invest in a modern mobile experience when clubs are locked into multi-year contracts? Monopolies in software don’t just stifle innovation — they redefine what “normal” looks like, until everyone forgets that the software is bad because they’ve never experienced good.
Golf’s culture of tradition created a tolerance for friction. Golf is a sport that proudly traces its roots to 15th-century Scotland. That reverence for tradition is part of the game’s charm. But it also created a cultural environment where technological friction was tolerated — even expected — in ways it wouldn’t be in other service industries. A hotel front desk running on a system from 2005 would be considered a crisis. A golf club running on an equivalent system? That’s just Tuesday.
The people who buy the software aren’t the people who use it. In many clubs, the decision to adopt or switch management software is made by a committee, a board, or a general manager — people who may interact with the system occasionally but don’t live in it eight hours a day. The pro shop staff, the booking administrators, the F&B coordinators who actually wrestle with the interface every morning? They often have limited input into procurement decisions.
Acquisitions prioritised revenue extraction over product improvement. Over the past five years, several significant golf technology companies have been acquired by private equity firms, holding companies, and media conglomerates. When the acquiring entity’s primary thesis is financial engineering rather than product excellence, the result is predictable: support teams get leaner, development slows, and the focus shifts from “how do we make this better?” to “how do we extract more margin?”
What “good” looks like (and why you should demand it)
Here’s the thing that should make every club administrator a little angry: the technology to run a golf club brilliantly already exists. It’s just being used by every adjacent industry except golf.
Dynamic pricing? Airlines figured this out decades ago. Hotels refined it. Restaurants adopted it. The technology to automatically adjust tee time rates based on demand, weather, day-part, and booking velocity is not science fiction.
Integrated payment processing? Every cafe you walk into taps a card or phone on a sleek terminal that reconciles automatically with their accounting software. Meanwhile, many golf clubs are still manually reconciling green fee payments across disconnected systems.
Intelligent CRM and automated communications? Your local yoga studio sends you a personalised re-engagement email if you haven’t booked a class in three weeks. The average golf club’s approach to member communication is a mass email blast built in a system that makes formatting a paragraph feel like a victory.
Mobile-first design? The concept that your software should work beautifully on a phone or tablet before it works on a desktop is nearly a decade old in consumer tech. Most golf management platforms still treat mobile as an afterthought.
The standard shouldn’t be “does it technically function.” The standard should be: “Would a competent 30-year-old GM — someone who grew up on intuitive consumer technology — find this tool genuinely enjoyable to use?”
The real cost of “good enough”
There’s a comforting lie that club committees tell themselves: “Our current system works fine.” And in a narrow technical sense, it usually does. The tee sheet displays bookings. Payments get processed. Competition results get posted. It works.
But “works” and “works well” are separated by an enormous gap — one measured in staff hours, missed revenue, member frustration, and operational brittleness.
Consider the administrator who spends 850+ hours per year on manual booking administration that a modern system could automate. Consider the revenue lost when your tee sheet can’t dynamically price based on demand. Consider the member experience when your online booking flow requires more steps than booking an international flight.
“Good enough” has a compound cost. It’s just distributed across so many small inefficiencies that no single one feels urgent enough to fix. But add them up over a year, and you’re looking at tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity, lost revenue, and lost goodwill.
The tide is turning — slowly
To be fair, the picture isn’t entirely bleak. The post-COVID golf boom — participation up 44% globally since 2016 — brought a wave of new players with distinctly digital expectations, and that demand signal is finally pulling golf technology forward.
Cloud-native platforms are gaining market share. A few genuinely modern systems have emerged, built by people who’ve looked at what hospitality and restaurant tech got right and asked, “Why can’t golf have this?” Month-to-month SaaS contracts are replacing the multi-year lock-ins that insulated bad software from consequences. AI is being embedded into pricing, communications, and even phone booking systems.
What you can do about it right now
If you’re a club administrator or GM reading this and nodding along, here’s the uncomfortable truth: the vendors won’t change until you make them.
Audit the hidden costs. Spend a week tracking how much time your team actually loses to manual processes, system workarounds, data re-entry, and phone calls that a better booking experience would eliminate. Put a dollar figure on it. Present that figure to your board.
Talk to your staff, not just your committee. The people who use the software daily know exactly where it fails. They’ve just stopped reporting it because nothing changes. Ask them. Listen.
Evaluate at least one alternative every year. Even if you’re not planning to switch, seeing what’s available recalibrates your sense of what’s possible. It also gives you leverage in renewal negotiations.
Prioritise integration over features. The next system you adopt should play well with your existing tools. The era of the monolithic all-in-one platform that does everything adequately and nothing brilliantly is ending. The future is modular: best-in-class tools connected by modern APIs.
Ask the hard questions. When a vendor shows you their roadmap, ask what they shipped in the last six months — not what they plan to ship in the next twelve. When they quote a price, ask for the total cost of ownership. When they tout their client numbers, ask for net growth — additions minus departures.
The industry deserves better
Golf is a $100 billion global industry serving millions of members and visitors who, in every other aspect of their lives, interact with technology that is intuitive, fast, and designed around their needs. The gap between what golfers and club staff experience in the rest of their digital lives and what they experience when they interact with golf club management software is, frankly, embarrassing.
But it’s also an opportunity. The clubs that move first — that demand modern, well-designed, genuinely useful technology — will operate more efficiently, generate more revenue, deliver better experiences, and attract the next generation of members and staff who won’t tolerate anything less.
The tee sheet that looks like it was built in 1999 has had a good run. It’s time to expect more.