The City of Calgary has begun staggering release times at city-operated golf courses as their booking system was struggling to manage the load.

That’s left some golfers in the rough trying to book tee times at one of the seven courses operated by the City of Calgary.

Steven Kenway said they organize a weekly men’s night each Monday across the various city golf courses, and the booking woes have led to a great deal of frustration.

“Throughout the year, we’ve had issues booking online, and the staff mentioned they couldn’t even accept our tee times over the phone,” Kenway told LiveWire Calgary.

He said the current system is clearly unable to handle the demand, and the golf course staff he’s talked to about it also expressed dissatisfaction.

“The current golf reservation system for City of Calgary courses is inadequate,” Kenway said.

The City of Calgary enjoyed a record year at city courses in 2023, with more than 320,000 duffers hitting the links. This season, the overwhelming demand has forced the City of Calgary to take action to spread out the load. They’ve even posted a message on their golf website informing patrons of the challenges.

It hasn’t always been that way, however. In previous years, the City had started to look at finding private operators for their courses, which were heavily subsidized.

John Faber, golf lead with the City of Calgary, said there are now roughly 85,000 registered golfers in the city’s booking system. He’s personally witnessed the anger of golf patrons unable to book tee times.

“I’ve said, ‘People envision this: You’ve got one door in a room, you’ve got 100 people. Only one person can get through that door.’ That’s basically the same thing,” Faber said.

“We’ve only got so much space, and we got the potential of 85,000 people trying to get the day’s tee times four days out. So, that’s the traffic part. It’s just volume.”

Faber said the biggest challenge so far this season has come on those days that have preceded summer weekends where the weather was beautiful – so, typically early in the week ahead of nice forecasts for Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  

Staggered tee time availability

To deal with the volume, Faber said they’ve changed the entry point for golfers to book online.

They’ve resorted to staggering the online opening of the four-day window for tee times.  Shaganappi Point times open at 7 a.m., Maple Ridge is at 8 a.m., McCall Lake is at 9 a.m.  Confederation and Lakeview are open for online bookings at 10 a.m.

Faber said Calgary courses are on their own dedicated server. They’ve also done a handful of software updates this season to try to help manage the demand. That’s something he said they’re typically reluctant to do as it can present more problems for the system.

“If something goes sideways, we’ve got seven golf courses and a lot of very unhappy golfers, but we took the risk, and it helped to some degree,” he said.

Kenway suggested that the City of Calgary should look at other potential vendors to provide the booking service.   Currently, the City of Calgary manages their bookings using the Club Prophet system.  A Calgary-based company, Club Unity, also provides a similar service used at other Calgary golf courses.

“The software provider appears unable to handle the traffic, resorting to throttling access to compensate for poor service levels,” Kenway said.

“As Calgary taxpayers subsidize municipal courses, both golfers and taxpayers deserve better.”

Faber said the contract was tendered two years ago, after three years and half a million to get the RFP to market. There’s complexity around the number of golf courses, privacy issues, and procurement practices they must follow.

“We truly appreciate every single person that comes and golfs our golf courses – wants to golf our golf courses,” Faber said.  

“We are fully aware of the challenges that we have with the booking system. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of the volume of seven golf courses, it’s not as easy as just changing the vendor, changing a setting, that kind of stuff.

“We are fully aware it caused a lot of stress on my frontline people, on my clubhouses, anybody in my golf administration team that deals with the tee sheets, the booking software.”

This year, the City of Calgary also launched a Mi7 Golf Loyalty product that allowed golfers to play unlimited golf at reduced rates at all seven courses.