Editorial: L.A.’s golf reservation system allows people to hog tee times. That’s wrong
For golfers, playing 18 holes offers roughly four hours of serenity, allowing them to exercise, socialize, test their skill and patience, and do it all on a pastoral stretch of green grass.
However, booking a tee time for that round of golf on a public course run by the city of Los Angeles is the exact opposite. It’s an infuriating predawn online showdown with the city’s booking site to snag reservations as soon as they become available online, only to find every morning slot at every coveted course already booked. Tee times at Rancho Park on the Westside and the courses in Griffith Park go in a flash.
L.A. golfers describe never being able to snag a desirable reservation despite trying to book at the earliest possible time.
Turns out this isn’t just because golf is popular — which it is. (And it got more popular during the pandemic when courses could stay open because it was a safe, socially distanced sport where players use their own equipment.)
Tee times are released to holders of annual player cards, which sell for $25, at 6 a.m. nine days ahead of time. (Los Angeles County releases its course times at 9 a.m. nine days out.) But even when players religiously sit before their computers at 5:59 a.m. poised to click and book the second course times open, they are routinely left with mid-to-late afternoon tee times that have a golfer playing into twilight.
A golf course isn’t necessarily the best place to build homes, but the state’s housing shortage is so severe that all options should be on the table.
Many regular players have long suspected there were brokers hogging tee times. Then golf instructor and influencer Dave Fink revealed on his Instagram account the messaging app that people were using to reach a broker and screenshots of reservation times for sale. A Los Angeles Times story reported that brokers were scooping up and selling tee time reservations for as much as $40 each. That’s on top of the fee already being charged per person at city courses, which ranges from $14 for 18 holes to $55 depending on time, day and other factors.
Now, city officials acknowledge that brokers are advertising tee times for resale.
“We realize the problem is a lot bigger than we thought,” said Rick Reinschmidt, the manager of the city courses, who added that in the past officials canceled player cards they saw for sale online and had the online security beefed up. “Now that we know it’s a growing problem we are going to have to put in some additional measures.”
Especially in California, the sport relies on extensive public subsidies and tax breaks. The Los Angeles Country Club, which is hosting the U.S. Open, is an example.
He has yet to offer any solutions, though said they would be announcing some very soon.
We hope so. It’s time for the city to come up with ways to fix this. Some may think golf is a waste of time and water, but the people who booked more than a million individual rounds of golf each year on the city’s 12 courses (seven of which are 18-hole courses) see the sport differently and desperately want the system fixed. Public courses run by the city and county are the places where anyone can play golf for a modest fee and not have to pay hefty prices at privately run public courses or join a country club where initiation costs can run into six figures — if they can even get in.
The county too has had some issues with brokering and has been working with other municipal courses, including the city of L.A., to come up with fixes, said Kevin Regan, who oversees the county’s 20 courses, which book an average of 1.2 million rounds of golf a year.
But, as Regan notes, you can’t make the booking system so impenetrable to bots and brokers that you inadvertently make it impossible for actual golfers to get a time.
Brokers and bots notwithstanding, it will always be difficult to book a desirable tee time at certain public courses as long as demand vastly exceeds capacity. This isn’t unique to golf courses. Popular campsites, for example, are also snapped up the instant they become available. Last year California State Parks decided to try a lottery system to award reservations for highly sought out cabins at Mount Tamalpais State Park. The idea is to make the process more fair and equitable.
What about a lottery for reservations on L.A.’s public golf courses? Or releasing new reservation times at random times instead of a fixed time each day? These are among the ideas that city officials should consider in designing a fairer system.
But they need to make some changes soon. These golf courses are a public asset and need to be protected from schemes that let some people hoard access. Golf on a municipal course is hardly an equitable experience for all if only some are getting access to the best times on that course.
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