When rounds across Fairfax County Park Authority’s eight municipal golf courses surged by 51% during the pandemic, Ryan Carmen faced an operational crisis. As director of golf, he and his team scrambled to keep track of tee times with handwritten notes and dealt with constant phone calls, hoping the goodwill of golfers willing to wait around for an opening would be enough.
“We relied on handwritten waitlists in the pro shops, advised golfers to frequently check the online booking system for cancellations (especially 24-48 hours in advance), and encouraged single golfers to show up and hope for an opening, which sometimes led to ‘squeeze times’ which disrupted the pace of play,” Carmen said. “In response, we had to elevate our customer service efforts to help mitigate the frustration of golfers unable to secure their preferred tee time.”
The fix came with Noteefy, a tee time management platform that fills cancellations automatically and alerts golfers on the waitlist.
Since adopting it, Carmen said accessibility issues have vanished — and, to his surprise, the technology’s most enthusiastic users have been older players.
“My reluctance was, ‘Will the 50-plus age group be resistant to adopting this new technology?’ But I kept thinking about it and finally just said we got to do this,” he said. “So we did, and as it turns out, that age group were the earliest adopters of Noteefy and they continue to be the most popular users of the technology, so I was glad to be proven wrong.”
Fairfax’s experience highlights a broader trend in golf. Courses of all types are building out “tech stacks” — a combination of systems and integrations that manage tee sheets, pricing, food and beverage, pace of play, customer communication and more. With players expecting convenience and seamless service, technology is no longer optional; it’s becoming the backbone of course operations.
Building the base
At the heart of a modern golf course’s technology is golf management software (GMS), which provides the tee sheet, point of sale and website backend. From there, courses can layer on additional tools — dynamic pricing, food and beverage management, revenue management, pace of play tracking and more.
Companies such as Club Caddie, Lightspeed and ForeUP design their GMS platforms as all-in-one solutions.
But as Jason Pearsall, CEO of Club Caddie, noted, not all courses share the same needs.
“A private course typically has more complex technology needs,” Pearsall said. “Their revenue streams are divided up, of course between golf, but also largely between all the amenities that are provided to members.”
In the public world, he added, a good chunk of revenue for a public golf course comes from three sources, which is greens fees revenue, cart fee revenue, and then the sale of alcohol and snack bar items.
“So it’s much easier to build a sophisticated technology stack for the needs of public courses,” Pearsall said.
Innovation at public courses
Public facilities like Fairfax County are often where the innovation happens first. Cloud-based solutions — from interactive voice response systems built into tee sheets and chatbots that handle bookings to sophisticated pricing algorithms — are helping operators meet demand and maximize revenue.
“[Some] private clubs that are still stuck in legacy back-end systems just don’t have the integration capabilities to really keep up with what’s happening on the public side,” Pearsall said. “I predict that will change over the next couple of years and you’ll see fully baked cloud-based solutions that will really drive innovation into the private space as well.”
Tee time management has been one of the biggest pressure points, and it’s where companies like Noteefy have stepped in.
“It’s all about how many incremental tee times we can help a golf course book as a result of refilling last-minute cancellations and no-shows,” said Jake Gordon, CEO of Noteefy.
Noteefy’s system now runs quietly in the background at Fairfax County’s courses, ensuring cancellations are refilled and golfers stay engaged.
“It enables a golf course to see how many last-minute tee times we helped them book,” Gordon said. “When they’re making an ROI decision about Noteefy, they know exactly how much value we’ve generated for them relative to the subscription price that they’re paying.”
The data advantage
For Carmen, the adoption of Noteefy wasn’t just about convenience; it was about improving customer engagement. That goal — to make the golf experience more seamless, and to keep players coming back — is one driving force behind the industry’s growing tech stack.
“Honestly, data is the future for all of the golf courses,” Pearsall said. “As an industry, we’re not yet appreciating enough the significance that data will play in the future for both customer service as well as driving revenue for our facilities. As AI is increasingly adopted at golf courses, that AI is only as intelligent as the data that we have to inform the decision making.”
Artificial intelligence is just the latest technology being rolled out to courses across the country. Companies are using AI in multiple ways: building member profiles so they can cater to habits and preferences, tracking weather patterns and golf cart usage, analytics tracking to manage spending, or acting as a virtual pro shop assistant to ease the burden on shop employees.
“All of those will drive a better customer experience, more revenue to the golf course and will enable the golf courses that are taking advantage and have that data profile of their customers to be more successful than their peers who aren’t taking advantage of the data,” Pearsall said.”
Gordon acknowledged that some operators are wary of new systems after past frustrations.
“I think legacy technology has at times let golf courses or golf operators down, and as a result, there may be some hesitation about trying new things,” he said. “But golf is just evolving overtime and obviously the boom in the industry has led to a lot more enthusiasm and willingness to invest in technology.”
Carmen has seen firsthand how a single technology can reshape the customer experience. What started as a way to manage pandemic demand has become a lasting tool for player engagement and operational efficiency.
He said the main objective behind adopting new technologies was to enhance customer engagement, which has led to repeat behavior and increased rounds played.
“We’re in a very good place,” he said. “The golf industry, even if rounds fluctuate up and down the next five years, it’s not going away at this point.”
(This story originally ran in the September/October 2025 issue of Golf Inc.)
