How tee time alerts work

The problem alerts solve

Popular tee times don’t stay open. On a busy weekend a cancellation at a well-located course like Bonneville can be rebooked within minutes of appearing, and the only way to catch it by hand is to sit on the booking page and refresh. A tee time alert service does that sitting for you: you say which courses, dates, and time windows you care about, and it tells you when a matching slot shows up — because someone canceled, or because the course released new inventory when its booking window opened. (When those windows open varies a lot by operator; our guide to getting tee times at busy Salt Lake City courses lists the local release schedules.)

How the machinery actually works

There is no push feed from most golf booking systems — no event that fires when a slot opens. So alert services work by polling: on a schedule, the service loads the course’s public availability the same way your browser would, compares it to what it saw last time, and messages you when something new matches your saved preferences. That has three practical consequences worth understanding before you rely on any alert service, ours included:

• The polling interval is the speed limit. A service that checks a course every 15 minutes cannot, on average, tell you about an opening faster than several minutes after it appeared.
• Coverage is per booking system. A service can only watch the systems it has integrated, so “we cover thousands of courses” matters less than whether it covers the booking systems your courses run.
• The alert is a snapshot, not a hold. Nothing is reserved for you. Between the check that found the slot and the moment you tap, another golfer may have booked it.

Dead alerts: the category's honest weakness

Ask golfers who have used alert services and one complaint dominates: the alert was already dead — the time was gone before they opened the message. That isn’t bad luck; it’s arithmetic. If a slot appears right after a service’s check, a long interval means the news is old before it’s sent. And if the service doesn’t re-verify before notifying you, it can’t know whether it’s sending you to a slot that still exists. Two design choices separate useful alert services from frustrating ones: how short the polling interval is, and whether the service checks the slot again at the moment you act on the alert.

How Teesheets does it

We built Teesheets around those two choices. It checks the courses it monitors roughly every 3–4 minutes — and when a high-demand booking window is about to open, it re-checks that course faster, because that’s when slots appear and vanish quickest. When you tap an alert, Teesheets verifies the time is still open at that moment before sending you to the course’s booking page, so you aren’t chasing ghosts. Alerts arrive by text or Telegram, whichever you prefer, and every alert links straight to the course’s own site — Teesheets never books on your behalf and never stands between you and the course. The same data also powers a public live board of open tee times across Utah, so you can see what’s available right now without signing up for anything.

What to look for in any alert service

• A disclosed checking interval. If a service won't say how often it checks, you can't judge how fresh its alerts are.
• Verification before or at notification time, so dead alerts are the exception rather than the routine.
• Coverage of the booking systems your actual courses use — see the course index for what each Utah course we monitor runs.
• A delivery channel you'll actually notice in time. A tee time that lasts four minutes is not an email problem.
• Honesty about what the service does not do — holds, guarantees, or bookings.

For what runs underneath all of this — the booking platforms themselves — read How golf booking systems work, or browse the Utah course index to see per-course booking details.

Frequently asked questions