How Tee Time Spot decides what it can responsibly watch.

Stage one

Find likely-public golf courses near the golfer.

Discovery starts with a bounded geographic search around a typed location or browser location. The default radius is 15 miles, with choices from 5 to 30 miles. Results are evaluated for golf-course type, operating status, name, official website evidence, and conflicting signals.

• Prefer places classified as golf courses and currently operational.
• Exclude explicit private or member-only club signals.
• Exclude simulators, golf stores, fitting studios, associations, and non-course sports facilities.
• Collapse duplicate place records that represent the same course at the same venue.
• Preserve distinct courses when a facility legitimately has more than one layout.

Automated place data can be noisy. A discovery result is therefore a likely-public course, not a claim that Tee Time Spot can already monitor its tee sheet.

Stage two

Resolve the official course and booking surface.

A course name alone is not enough. Tee Time Spot compares stable place identifiers, addresses, coordinates, official websites, booking links, and venue relationships. This helps prevent a similarly named private club, pro shop, or third-party directory from being treated as the course itself.

Booking links are expected to originate from the course's official site or a booking provider that the official site uses. Search results and aggregators may help locate a surface, but they are not sufficient evidence by themselves.

Stage three

Classify access before retrieving a tee sheet.

Each course is evaluated for booking method, provider, public access, and policy. A public online tee sheet may still be unsupported technically; an understandable provider does not automatically mean retrieval is allowed.

• Allowed and supported: a public surface can be observed without entering checkout, using an account, or bypassing a control.
• Needs support: the course has public online booking, but Tee Time Spot does not yet have a verified adapter for the provider or configuration.
• Manual or phone booking: there is no suitable public tee sheet to monitor.
• Blocked: published policy prohibits automation or the surface requires an account, captcha, verification code, queue, or other restricted flow.

Stage four

Compare observed openings with the saved alert.

Supported observations are normalized into a course, start time, available spot count, official booking link, and any available price or hole information. The start time is interpreted in the selected course's local time zone.

A match must fall on the requested date, within the requested time window, and provide enough spots for the selected group. Stable source information helps avoid duplicate alerts. Courses are processed independently so one failure does not suppress another course's valid result.

Ongoing review

Correct the real shape, not just the visible symptom.

Course data, booking systems, and policies change. Tee Time Spot records evidence about observed outcomes and uses focused tests when a false course, duplicate, unsupported provider, or broken booking link is reported. Corrections aim for stable identity evidence rather than broad name rules that could hide legitimate courses.

Golfers can report a missing course or broken experience from the search and feedback controls. See contact options for the best channel.

Interpretation

What an alert can and cannot prove.

• An alert proves that a matching opening was observed, not that it remains available.
• A course appearing in discovery does not prove that its booking page is supported.
• Prices, fees, hole counts, cart rules, and cancellation terms remain controlled by the course.
• Temporary provider failures can delay or prevent observations.
• No alert can guarantee that a cancellation will happen or that another golfer will not book first.