If you’re just getting around to your golf vacation travel plans for 2025 you may be somewhat out of luck. These are heady times for resorts across the country, with some locations already booked during the premium months and beyond.
But not all is lost just yet.
There is hope with Noteefy, a California-based company that has an app platform to improve booking experiences that golf travelers need to check out.
Noteefy, which bills itself as ”Golf’s No. 1 Demand Technology,” is on a remarkable start-up trajectory. The company had less than 100 golf course and resort partnerships a year ago after launching in 2023, and now has 570 locations signed up. And its online platform is used by seven of the top 10 golf management companies.
“Noteefy is kind of like a digital booking assistant that connects golfers with their desired tee time at great properties,” Jake Gordon, Noteefy CEO and co-founder, says. “The way it works is golfers put their future demand into the system and we will notify them if and when an available tee time comes up — which could be as soon as the same day or indefinitely into the future. So we’re connecting supply and demand in an automated, real-time fashion.”
Gordon said Noteefy is now working with 80 of the top 200 resorts in the United States, with locations such as Chambers Bay, Streamsong, Kohler Wisconsin, Cabot, Sand Valley and Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail. California already has 162 locations signed up in less than two years time, while Florida has 42 locations utilizing the platform.
Boyne Golf recently partnered with Noteefy to enhance its booking experiences at all 11 courses at the Northern Michigan resort destination.
RELATED: Tee-time frustration leads Jake Gordon to create Noteefy
“Boyne Golf is in the business of creating fun experiences, and if the booking process is hard, the level of fun is diminished before golfers even arrive on property,” says Josh Richter, senior vice president of golf operations at Boyne Resorts. “Like OpenTable and Resy in the restaurant world, Noteefy is the concierge that does the work for golfers.”
While the Noteefy concept is aimed at helping golf courses and resorts maximize tee-time profits, it has also become a valuable tool golf travelers can access if certain resort courses are booked now, but might open up down the line with cancellations or additional tee times released.
And Noteefy is not standing still, adding two new options to help streamline the tee time booking process even further.
“We’ve expanded our capabilities beyond just a digital tee time assistant into something that’s focused a little bit more on ‘no show’ mitigation,” Gordon says. “So we’ve built in like an automated doctor’s office reminder. We pretty much want to make sure that you’re going to show up to your tee time when it comes open. And we know stuff happens, so golfers have an easy way to cancel directly into the tee sheet.”
And then there is a soon-to-be released technology called Queue, which Gordon says will have the capability similar to a digital call center, helping resorts with automating its supply and demand tee time matching process.
“Really, in the end it’s all about convenience,” Gordon says. “It’s all about customer experience, it’s all about elevating the resort booking journey for that customer.”
Sand Valley Golf Club in Nekoosa, Wisconsin, less than a two-hour drive from Madison, opened in 2017 and has five layouts. Resort executives can’t say enough great things about the Noteefy technology platform.
“It has undoubtedly been a game-changer for us,” Jordan Powell, Sand Valley assistant director of business operations, says. “We would have never been able to achieve the goals we had set with online tee times and what we call ‘day of’ traffic without the assistance of Noteefy. We’ve not only leveraged it to fill white space on our tee sheets and as a wait list tool for those looking for tee times at Sand Valley, but we’ve also leveraged it to use as a tool to release new tee times.”
For example, Powell said the resort released its summer 2024 tee times through Noteefy.
“We didn’t send out any sort of e-blasts,” Powell says. “We just went ahead and released the tee times and let Noteefy do its work … and it was a great success. I’m logged in to Noteefy and using its platform pretty much on a daily basis now.”
Noteefy has grown into Canada, the Dominican Republic … even a course in Japan.
“Working with a lot of big, multi-course operators we’ve scaled our system across their entire portfolios,” Gordon says. “One of our new partners is the U.S. Marine Corps. They have a property in Japan so that’s how that happened.”
Powell says it’s difficult to quantify how many man-hours the Noteefy technology has saved the Sand Valley staff, not to mention the time saved by traveling golfers not having to call pro shops or refresh computer browsers searching for tee times.
“It’s kind of hard to put a number on it because a lot of the things that Noteefy does we weren’t doing before because we just didn’t have the bandwidth to actually achieve it,” he says.
Powell points out that Sand Valley, which is less than a decade old, was open to new ideas that possibility older, more established resorts may take more time to process the benefits of Noteefy over their established operating systems.
“Not only are we new but we’re constantly growing at an incredible pace,” Powell says of Sand Valley. “So with that comes the need for software systems to help us be more efficient. It was a perfect partnership with how young we were, how young Noteefy was. They help us and build our product around what we’re looking for and we give them the feedback that they need to grow and build their product out to potentially fit a larger customer base of resorts and daily fee courses.”
Noteefy sent out more than 2 million tee time availability alerts in 2024.
“The golf industry has kind welcomed us in, which again is great since I know when golf operators hear the word ‘technology’ they might wince a little bit,” Gordon says. “It has been an adventure, and we wake up every day and we think, ‘How can we make the lives of operators better?’ And if you can achieve that for a course operator then it makes it much easier for golfers as well.”
