L.A. touts success at blocking tee time brokers from city golf courses

Los Angeles Times

19-03-2025

For years, it was an open secret: Brokers scooped up tee times at public golf courses across Los Angeles and sold prime slots online, profiting from taxpayer-owned recreation.
Golfers complained about the extreme difficulty, bordering on impossibility, of playing on pristine and affordable municipal courses like those in Griffith Park and Rancho Park.
The problem burst into public view last spring when evidence of the brokering hit social media. The Times interviewed two brokers who shared how they sold coveted tee times.
Amid the uproar, L.A.'s Department of Recreation and Parks introduced a pilot program to curb the profiteers. Golfers have to pay $10 per person to reserve a tee time, which is forfeited if a reservation is canceled.
Nearly 10 months later, the fee — initially met with skepticism and annoyance — has proved a success, according to golfers and parks officials as well as reservation data shared with The Times.
'I didn't think charging a $10 fee would make a difference, but it certainly did,' said Reggie Kenner, 77, of Manhattan Beach, who also golfs on Los Angeles County's network of courses, which instituted a similar fee shortly after the city. 'Now, you can occasionally get on at a decent time on courses you could never book before.'
'It's still hard, but that's natural because a lot of players like golfing on the weekend,' said Jongseo Joseph Lee, president of the SoCal Dream Golf Club, who golfs twice a month on city courses.
Lee, who performed extensive research on brokers and helped submit complaints to parks officials well before the public furor, was a plaintiff in an unsuccessful class-action suit against the city over bureaucrats' alleged failure to stop tee time brokering.
'I can say it's way better than recent years,' he added.
Betty Brix, who plays thrice weekly on city courses and is chair of the Golf Advisory Committee, which provides recommendations and oversight for the Department of Recreation and Parks staffers who manage L.A.'s 12 golf courses, said the situation has 'improved immensely.'
'I'm able to get a tee time every time I attempt to get it,' she said.
The parks department signaled victory in the fight against brokers but stopped short of declaring the practice has been fully eliminated.
'The process used by tee time brokers to book, advertise, resell, and rebook tee times has been drastically reduced,' spokesperson Romondo Locke said in a statement.
Under the previous system, golfers paid nothing to secure a reservation. Each morning at 6 a.m., tee times opened up for nine days ahead. Within seconds, the best times, like 8 a.m. on a Saturday at Rancho Park on the Westside, were gone.
A network of brokers — many of them in the Korean community — gobbled up several prime slots and then peddled them on social media, especially on the Korean app KakaoTalk. They sold the tee times for up to $40 each, according to pricing sheets posted on social media.
After golf professional and social media influencer Dave Fink publicized the tee time black market to his more than 200,000 Instagram followers last March, #FreeTheTee became a rallying cry and a call for public accountability.
One broker, Ted Kim, told The Times that he used several computers to score tee times at L.A. city golf courses and other public courses across Southern California, making a couple thousand dollars a month selling them. But he denied violating any laws, and he did not respond to recent messages seeking comment.
Brokers would book reservations under a golfer's player card, as Kim acknowledged, or they would transfer tee times by doing orchestrated hand-offs: canceling a reservation at an odd hour, then rebooking it under a customer's name.
Kevin Fitzgerald, former chair of the Golf Advisory Committee, said data reviewed by parks officials appeared to confirm the hand-off scheme.
Fitzgerald said cancellations would occur at obscure times, like 2:48 a.m.
'All of a sudden, there would be a rebook in three seconds, which isn't possible without it being coordinated,' he said. 'At the low traffic hours, you'd expect it would take some time to rebook and not disappear in a matter of seconds.'
Under the program instituted in May, golfers pay the $10 fee — essentially a deposit — for each person on a reservation. The individual who reserves the group must be present on the day of play. The $40 deposit for a foursome then applies to the total admission price, or greens fee, at the course, with a cancellation forfeiting the fee. Green fees typically run about $32 to $50 per person but are discounted for seniors and juniors and for less popular times.
From May to October 2024 — the first six months of the pilot program — the number of tee times booked and then canceled dropped by nearly 95% compared with the same period in 2023, from 339,732 to 17,739.
On the reservation platform, nearly 400 golfers had profiles with more than 60 cancellations, which plummeted to 13 golfers after the fee.
'Because there weren't any repercussions in place to tee time cancellations, they were able to hoard all available time slots and sell them through third-party outlets,' said Locke, the Department of Recreation and Parks spokesperson.
Fitzgerald, the former Golf Advisory Committee chair, said that when the pilot program started last spring, he 'got a lot of calls saying, 'This is outrageous and won't help.''
'But within a month, the calls were completely the opposite,' he continued. 'I heard the following: I don't like paying the deposit, but I secured a tee time on the Wilson course at 10:30 on a Saturday for the first time in six years. So something good is happening.''
Golfers also described the downsides of the $10 fee. If something comes up that causes a golfer to miss a tee time, they lose the money. Others say the fee-splitting among golfers is cumbersome. And if the person who reserved the foursome isn't present, the other golfers aren't allowed to play.
'I probably book less tee times now, just because I don't want to be charged,' said Luis León, a golfer and content creator. At first, slots were more available, he said, 'but that didn't seem to last, as it's still nearly impossible to get good times at places like Rancho Park and Griffith Park.'
'It would be unfair to say this is completely smooth and there are no burdens associated with this,' Fitzgerald said.
There is still residual frustration over how the city dealt with the brokering problem.
Lee, who filed the class-action suit, had accused the city of being sluggish in instituting simple reforms that would preserve the integrity of public golf courses. The suit also alleged that a city parks staffer had accepted money from one of the brokers, suggesting that corruption was a factor in the tee time scheme.
In a statement, the Recreation and Parks Department said it 'has no indication or reason to believe that any city employee has engaged in that type of improper activity.' Nevertheless, the parks department acknowledged that it had not launched a 'formal investigation' into tee time brokering — despite promising to do so.
'Given the positive outcome of the pilot program, a formal investigation was not required,' Locke said in the statement.
Brix and Fitzgerald, the current and former chairs of the Golf Advisory Committee, asserted there was no evidence of misconduct by parks staffers.
'That was the most discouraging part of it,' Brix said of the allegations of misconduct, adding that some staffers received death threats over tee time brokering. 'All they are trying to do is provide a good experience for L.A. City golf.'
Time on L.A. city golf courses remains in record demand. In 2024, more than 1 million rounds were played on the city's 12 courses — a 28% increase from 2019. Revenue from golfing subsidizes some other city parks programs.
Recently, the Golf Advisory Committee recommended that the city make the pilot program permanent but adjust its structure to allow reservation fees of 'up to' $10. This would give parks officials more latitude to set lower reservation fees for less desirable time slots, such as 4 p.m.
'I don't think the system is completely fixed, because I don't think anything is ever completely fixed,' Brix said, 'but I think it's well on its way to being as good as can be for the big system we have.'