Mike Hendrix (00:00)
Hello. I am Mike Hendrix from smbGOLF. And today my guests are Kathleen Oshima and Adam Jaffe from Google. And this is the Tech Caddie podcast.

Kathleen, Adam, welcome to the show.

Adam Jaffe (00:29)
Thanks for having us.

Mike Hendrix (00:31)
Well, we're excited to have you in. Kathleen, do we have you out there in Cambridge? OK. So we asked you guys to come on today to talk about Google Reserve and Tee Times. But before we get into that, we've not had someone from Google on the show. And so I think it'd be interesting to just hear from you guys briefly how you came to Google.

Kathleen Oshima (00:35)
Yes.

Mike Hendrix (00:57)
What is, you know, was Google the North Star for you when you were looking for a job? But it would be interesting, Kathleen, to hear, you know, how you got from Duke, to Google. I think that would be interesting for our listeners.

Kathleen Oshima (01:09)
Yeah, great. First off, I wanted to just say thank you for having us. We're always really excited to talk about what we're working on and what we're excited about. And yeah, this seems like a great way to get the word out about some of the new features that we have launched and are continuing to iterate on. So yeah, I'm Kathleen. I'm the product lead on our golf search effort at Google. I also lead a broader set of experiences on search that encompass the whole range of things to do. And so that includes

anything from when users are coming looking for museums or parks or in this case golf courses. So we think about sort of the whole things to do space on a horizontal basis so that we can really maximize the features that we're building and the impact we're having. Yeah, I've been at Google for a little over 10 years. And I guess my path to Google was I actually started as a software engineer, did that for about five years and then got really excited about the product manager role.

Just because I wanted to focus a little bit more on solving some of these user problems and then building awesome experiences that actually make people's lives better. And those people include myself. So it's been just really fun to build these features and now to bring them to golf.

Mike Hendrix (02:23)
Yeah, I guess if you, if you work at Google, it's almost impossible to say what you do and your job doesn't somehow impact your own life because of the, the penetration that Google has into all of our daily lives. So yeah, that's an interesting way to look at it. Adam, how about you? I think you're in New York city. but curious to know you are a lead as it relates to partnerships. Curious to know how you got to your role and how you got to Google.

Adam Jaffe (02:50)
Yeah, yeah, I'm the partnerships, partnerships lead for Google search. I would say I'm more of a media and entertainment guy that kind of fell into a tech job. So I've worked at a new startup. I worked at Warner Media doing strategy and business development. A lot of my work at Warner Media was around pushing us into new, new mediums. So thinking about things like AR, VR, voice.

IoT, that kind of thing. And so that's really what drew me to Google. I actually started at Google on Google Assistant, doing strategy for our voice assistant before moving over to Search. I've been here for a little over six years now on the Search team for that. So it's been sort of a winding path to get here, but I'm very happy to be here.

Mike Hendrix (03:42)
No, that's great. So back on July 5th, and maybe I found this on July 4th, but on July 5th, I just published a short little article about how I was seeing book online buttons on golf course listings, whether it be search, Google Maps, et cetera. And that certainly was new to me. Kathleen, if you don't know, I've been in golf for a couple of decades, and especially golf technology.

marketplaces. and, so I'm very familiar with the space at any rate, certainly on July 5th, when I published that article, that was not the beginning of Google's entry into tee times. If you will, there, there obviously had been a lot of work going on before you all went live. And I actually don't know the date you went live, but I, I did think it would be interesting for you to, kind of share with us the origin story. Like how is it?

that Google got exposed to tee times, became interested in golf. I think that would be interesting for people to hear and understand. It gives good context for the story moving forward.

Kathleen Oshima (04:53)
Adam, do you want to take that or I guess I can take that? Adam was actually probably more involved in some of the initial partnership conversations more so than I was. But I think in general, I mentioned I personally work across really wide range of, we consider them different verticals within the leisure space. so at any given time, we're sort of looking at

the user needs, the queries that we're getting, the sort of like places where we feel like there's a lot of pain in a user journey. And we're just constantly sort of like evaluating and figuring out where we think we can have the most impact in terms of, you know, making our users' lives better. And so I think just like in these routine investigations, we find like, you know, actually we're getting a lot of golf searches coming into Google.

And we're seeing a lot of users either dropping off or telling us that they're unhappy with the experience they had because they weren't able to book a tee time and that was their main goal, or they weren't able to find some core information that they were looking for. And so I think it's nothing magic or no one demanded that we do this, but we just found that golf was a place where users are facing a lot of friction and there are a lot of users. And so that's where we decided.

to invest and we started these conversations and I think we were met with I think a lot of support generally from the different partners on wanting us to actually build these experience and make this user experience better.

Mike Hendrix (06:29)
Adam, does that mean that you initially contacted different marketplaces that are aggregators that were involved with tee times? And so that's how it works at Google. Like you do outreach or, or was there already inbound interest and you, and you followed up on

Adam Jaffe (06:48)
I think what's important to know about our entry into golf is that it's come from a few different features, some of which we've created for golf specifically and some of which existed already. So what you saw, I think you mentioned in July, was probably the Reserve with Google expansion into golf. And Reserve with Google had the appointments integration that had existed for a few years where across a wide variety of categories,

hair salons, local services, professional services, we would enable booking entry points on search and maps for those businesses that redirect to that merchant's scheduling page. And so that is where we first expanded into golf. And so that feature already existed. It was more about how do we continue to expand where this could be useful? tee times there's a clear sort of

linked to appointment booking that we felt was very natural. And so I think then based on the reception that we saw through that said, okay, there's more here, the ecosystem's excited, there's more that we can think about. And then that's when we started to think about how do we make some more golf specific features to help enrich that journey.

Mike Hendrix (08:12)
And so you started to contact aggregators or did they, or did they contact you first?

Adam Jaffe (08:17)
It's it. I don't remember what the first one was, but it probably was inbound. You know, it goes both ways. So we do. We do some proactive outreach, but we also get a lot of inbound requests. This is a public integration, so any scheduling provider in a wide variety of categories can apply for this.

Mike Hendrix (08:38)
Right, right. I've to that Google Reserve page and it is a wide variety of...

Adam Jaffe (08:46)
Yeah,

it's all across dining and travel and events. so there's a big team that sort of supports all of this inbound interest. And so that's how we usually find these partners.

Mike Hendrix (09:03)
Right, right. I was actually watching a webinar earlier today and there's a metric in golf that deals with people ordering golf balls, right? So because you go through golf balls as you play golf and so if you can track the ordering of golf balls, it helps you to understand the growth or decline year over year of golf.

And the stat they shared was since 2019, and of course, 2019 people reference a lot because of COVID, pre-COVID, if you go to today, golf ball orders are up 40%. And so I'm sure you all were seeing a similar thing. You all were seeing an increase in golf searches and likely tee time searches. And so maybe Google Reserve and tee times doesn't even happen without COVID, who knows? But now that

that golf has just really popped so much lately here. I'm sure it's a good fit for your users.

So tell me what's Google's goal as it relates to tee times? think it, I have a feel for what I think the answer is, but it'd be interesting to hear from you all specific to tee times. What's the goal?

Kathleen Oshima (10:19)
Yeah, I think it's sort of the goal with all of the search features we build. We want our users to accomplish whatever they set out to do. So in the case of tee times, users are coming to search and they're trying to book a tee time and a golf course. It's as simple as that. And so as long as we can enable them to do that, we've accomplished our goal there. And I think prior to us either launching the book online button or the tee times module,

users weren't able to do that. And that's, you know, again, the problem we were going after and the issues we were seeing is just users saying like, I don't know how to book. And I'm sure that you have gone to your fair share of pretty gone through your fair share of pretty horrible booking experiences. I think some of the golf industry like lags behind a little bit on some of the online stuff in particular. So, so yeah, I think like we've already made a lot of progress and we're seeing users more satisfied and sort of just leaving our site happier.

Mike Hendrix (11:17)
Yes, I I understand and I hear what you're saying for sure. And it's actually something I wanted to speak with you about in this episode, because I think you probably have some, some knowledge and understanding that a lot of golf course operators could benefit from. you forgive me, set aside Google for a second, talking about their website that, you know, my impression always our goal when, when, when I was at GolfNow was we wanted people to be able to

book a tee time and as few clicks as possible. We didn't want to present them with a terms and conditions page before we showed them inventory, right? If they wanted to see inventory, we wanted to show it to them immediately. We had respect for terms and conditions, but there was a place and time in the purchase flow that we were going to present those. But big picture, it'd be interesting to hear from you. Like, what do you think a great booking experience is? What, if you were going to build

a booking app for something, what would you be thinking about on day one?

Kathleen Oshima (12:20)
I think you touched on that. In general, the fewer clicks or swipes or pages a user has to visit, the more likely they are to actually complete a booking. And so it's something that we've worked on with the reserve with Google Flow. We try to make that as simple as possible so that users can complete their booking within a couple clicks. And I think this is sort of like an industry standard of like if you introduce more pages or the terms and conditions or...

you know, extra back clicks. Users are going to drop off because I think we just don't like to put up with all that extra work. And so yeah, just just you know if you can complete something in one one click, you're going to have a much better completion rate than something that takes three clicks.

Mike Hendrix (13:04)
Yeah. Adam, do you ever get pushed back as you're going through partnerships, whether it's golf or different industries, you ever get pushed back on, well, but the booking flow has to be this way because of this thing and where Google maybe isn't completely in agreement because they don't think it's the best user experience. Do you come up against that?

Adam Jaffe (13:21)
We have guidelines for our booking partners on how that landing page should be presented to the user. And what we really care about is if a user clicks on a button that says Book Online, that they're able to do that, that they're not getting misled to something else, that they're not hitting a login wall, that then they're going to come back to Google and say, I didn't actually get what I wanted. We find that for the most part, these guidelines

are in line with what our partners want because it's about being really clear to the user, here's how you can book, here's the next step. We do see to your point, a lot of scheduling providers do it differently. They have a login page somewhere in the flow or they have different ways of presenting deals or they're asking for information and you do see users drop off from this. So I would just echo what you and Kathleen have said, which is,

just as much friction as you can remove as possible and as clear as you can make it to the user of, here's what you're getting, click this button, you can book it immediately. That's where we see the highest user satisfaction.

Mike Hendrix (14:34)
Google partners with different types of companies related to this, this tee time situation, Google Reserve. Sometimes you're going to work with a company that's really a point of sale company that happened to build a reservation system. Other times you're working with an aggregator who really is actually all about booking, right?

Booking is in their DNA, the ease of booking, et cetera, et cetera. I can imagine that maybe when you work with someone who whose initial DNA is point of sale, maybe some of these things don't resonate with them as much, or maybe they're actually not even built to support it. don't know, but it'd be interesting to hear from you. have you noticed the differences and yeah, this company is actually a point of sale company that build an add on application. Whereas this company.

I see that you work with like Greenfee 365, right? Greenfee 365 is truly a reservation company. It'd be interesting to hear from you, can you tell the difference when you're going back and forth?

Adam Jaffe (15:43)
Yeah, I think it's a great point, which is that we work with a number of different types of companies that can provide that instant booking capability. So that can be an aggregator or marketplace. That can be a booking engine. That can be a golf management system, which is sort of the equivalent to kind of a POS system in other categories. And so we think about that those

you know, as long as they have that capability to access the merchant's calendar and instantly book that time, that's what we're looking for. And so we do see different approaches based on the business model of the scheduling provider. Marketplaces think about these things very differently than the point of sale system. The incentives are a little bit different. The point of sale system has to really serve the merchant. And usually there's a subscription-based

revenue models that really rely on them delivering value and making it easier to manage a business. A marketplace, on the other hand, might have a different business model, a different relationship with the end merchant. They may care lot more about keeping the user on their platform, maybe suggesting deals to them, other sort of explorations that they want to put in front of the user. And so it really depends on the business model.

how they're thinking about the user when they come to their site and kind of what they ultimately wanted to get from them that impacts how these experiences are for the user ultimately.

Mike Hendrix (17:22)
Kathleen, a good question actually would be, are you a golfer? Are you familiar with the background of golf and how golf works?

Kathleen Oshima (17:31)
I think some people might cringe if I said I was a golfer, but I do enjoy walking around a golf course with some clubs and occasionally making contact with the ball, yes.

Mike Hendrix (17:45)
But now I would assume you know what an interval is and you understand the difference between 10 and 100 intervals and seven eights. And I would imagine at this point, you're pretty immersed in it.

Kathleen Oshima (17:54)
Yeah, so I think the whole team actually had a pretty steep learning curve on just understanding what the needs are. And I think we went through several iterations just even on the UX where, you know, we had some, we try to keep things simple, you know, because that's easier for users. And I think we started with really simple designs, then realized, actually, tee time booking is quite complex, and you need the filtering and you need, you know, in some cases, a ton of time slots, you know, in some cases,

courses aren't releasing their time slots until a week before or some other timeframe. And so as we ramped up to the space, we changed our designs, we changed our principles behind how frequently we needed to update time slots, how much control we needed to give users, and what was actually useful to show users on Google before we sent them off to actually complete a booking. so yeah, think we landed on a pretty...

good product and one that still feels simple to use.

Mike Hendrix (18:53)
Yeah. How far out will you pull inventory?

You know, days in advance, like 90 days, 180 days, like what, how far out are you all looking?

Kathleen Oshima (19:02)
That is a good question. think we're around the one month range right now. And a lot of that is subject to change, but we did a little bit of research on how far in advance courses are often releasing their times. And we just settled on a number that seemed like it gave us a good enough coverage without over-engineering the experience.

Mike Hendrix (19:26)
Let me ask you about this, because this is something that some of the reservation companies struggle with a little bit. What about if I'm searching at 8 p.m. or 7 p.m. local? Do you have anything in place that knows, hey, this person's probably not looking for a tee time at 7 p.m., although I acknowledge some people have outdoor nighttime options. Is there anything in the Google system that's built to just default me to the next day?

Kathleen Oshima (19:58)
Yeah, I think at this point we're defaulting to the next available tee time. So in the case that that user actually is looking to do some nighttime golfing, we might show them those slots that are available in the next couple of hours probably. generally, we're defaulting to the next available tee. That's great. Yeah.

Mike Hendrix (20:19)
There's actually a lot of people that you're working with today, the different partners. it can actually be 9 PM and they will, you will land on a page that says there's no inventory left today. And it's like, well, I understand that. Why wouldn't you just default me to tomorrow? Right. It's 9 PM, but, that's, that's good to hear how you, how you all built it. let's talk a little bit about, what it takes for a golf course to benefit.

from this. And I know there's different notions out there and maybe some people have said things that maybe aren't correct. So I just thought it'd be good to kind of go through a couple of things, Adam. To have the book online button point directly to your booking engine. You must or you don't need to own your Google business profile?

Adam Jaffe (21:16)
So we encourage every merchant, every golf course, to claim their business profile. This is a really, really important step for you to manage your business's presence on Google. There's a process that, if you haven't done it, you'll go through to verify that you are the course owner. And by doing so, that allows you some settings and toolings to manage what the presentation of your business looks like on Google. You can also.

remove booking links, that kind of thing. I would say, yes, definitely claim your business profile. Then in terms of getting your booking engine up to behind that book online button, your booking provider would have to complete the integration. So there's a little bit of development work on their end that they have to do to plug into our systems. And so that has to be done by the partner. And then that partner will enable

the book online button on their end for your course. Some of them do this kind of automatically. If they've done the integration, they just opt everyone in. Some of them get explicit opt in. It sort of depends on the approach of the booking engine. But it's up to the booking engine. And so you have to work with your booking engine to do this.

Mike Hendrix (22:33)
But I don't believe because you we have a lot of data in my company and we're and we track all this stuff. The data suggests you don't actually need to own your profile to have your the book online button go directly to your booking engine. That's the that's what the data suggests. Would you say that's accurate?

Adam Jaffe (22:52)
I think that we will enable the book online button as long as there's a match to a Google business profile that the partner is sending us.

Mike Hendrix (23:02)
But

it doesn't need to be claimed by the individual owner of the golf course, so to speak. Right.

Adam Jaffe (23:07)
I think that's right. But I would say it again, we would really advocate for every golf course to claim their not just because of the booking, but for a number of reasons. It protects your business. can manage the presentation of your business and, you can adjust settings like booking within a much easier.

Mike Hendrix (23:27)
I so for the record, I completely agree with you. I think everyone I'm disappointed in how many golf courses haven't verified their profile, don't own their profile. So I totally acknowledge that. But also, you know, just in looking at the data, it's obvious they don't need to own it to enjoy this benefit. It's just it's just the way the way that is. Let's talk about Kathleen, like what I call

the 2.0 version of the integration. But, but I'd love to hear if you guys are talking about it differently. This is where some of the partners you have have now enabled or, you know, kind of gone to the next level with Google where the actual tee time chips, the, the, you know, 9:10 in the morning, 9:20 in the morning, those

appear in a mobile environment, not in a desktop environment today, but in a mobile environment, those specific tee times are available. Talk a little bit about how that's going. I think that's the most recent thing you've done, but it'd be interesting for all of us to learn what's the newest thing and specific to the tee time specificity, how that's going.

Kathleen Oshima (24:39)
Yeah, sure. So you're right, that's our latest launch and the newest module that you'll see on a Google business profile for golf now, if we have this integration. And so we are showing the specific tee time slots when a partner is sending us that data. And so obviously it involves some sort of integration on the partner side.

But we do have several partners onboarded at this point. And so you'll notice it on some courses today. So we're showing exactly the inventory we're getting from these partners. And we're showing which time slots are available so that users can, again, you can select a specific date that day that you're looking for. So again, if you are looking on a Thursday, but you're actually planning something for this weekend, you can update it to say you're looking for Saturday and you need a slot that can support four people.

We actually real-time updates of what slots are available. Once you choose your time and click through, we send you out to the partner site that provided that time slot, and then you can complete the booking on that site.

Mike Hendrix (25:48)
Yeah, I would think from Google's perspective, you would be thrilled with that. mean, that is a great user experience, right? I mean, I really, think for a lot of people that have experienced Google Flights, it's very similar. I understand Google Flights is certainly little more involved and there's a couple of extras there, but it's similar to the Google Flights experience. And I think it's outstanding, frankly, for the golfer. It just makes it easy to find and book a tee time.

Kathleen Oshima (26:14)
Yeah, we're really excited to get this out the door. It launched pretty late last year in 2024, and we're increasing our coverage and spreading this to more partners and more courses, obviously. But yeah, it prevents sort of this ogle effect that we were seeing where users were going to booking sites, coming back to Google, going out to another site, coming back, just looking for that specific tee time. And now that we're able to actually

provide all of those slots right on your business profile. We're seeing a lot of better task completion from our users.

Mike Hendrix (26:52)
I can imagine, yeah.

Adam Jaffe (26:53)
So I do want to make one distinction, is Google flights, you can search across merchants and you can say, you know, I'm looking for a flight at this time. You can't do that with golf. So the tee times that are presented will be presented for a course that the user is already navigating to. And so it is an important distinction. This is not, you you're not able to kind of search across tee times across merchants.

Mike Hendrix (27:17)
You are correct. That's super important distinction. So thanks. But yes, I show you guys as having 15 partners that are at least have some exposure to North America. Yeah, I'm sure it's more worldwide. And then a handful of those partners at this 2.0 level, this tee time specificity level, GolfBack, golfscape, Supreme Golf. I'm sure there's more, but 15 is really impressive, I think.

Right? That you, that you there, there's at least 15 platforms or systems that have integrated with a Reserve with Google, you know, specific to golf. think that's wonderful. We also know, I think there's some feeling in the industry, Adam, that there are tee sheet providers that are not interested in working with Google. But, but I don't, I don't know that I'm in that bucket because I talk to these tee sheet companies. I talked to

Club Profit, Club Caddie, Lightspeed, MemberSports, Proshop Tee Times, Teesnap. They have all told me they are working on this. They, they were hopeful to have it completed by now. And I don't mean they're thinking about starting. mean, they are, they are in the midst of this. Talk to me a little bit about the backlog. Like Are there so many golf entities in the world that are kind of in the queue with Google that

it's becoming a challenge to get through all these different partnerships?

Adam Jaffe (28:53)
Great question. There are two pieces to this integration that fall onto the partners. So the first is completing the Reserve with Google appointments integration. That is something that is pretty widely accessible to partners. can move at their own pace. So there's a system in place for partners to go at their own pace. They plug into our system, and you move along at your pace. The second piece, I think you've been calling it

Golf 2.0, which is the tee times module, that is, because we're still getting it off out of the trial, that's an additional piece of the integration that exists separately from the appointments integration. And so partners will need to complete the Reserve with Google integration and then in addition, the tee time module. Typically, this takes partners, the whole thing, anywhere from

You know, two to six weeks on average, we've seen partners do it in a few days. We've seen partners take many months to do it because a lot of this is really driven by the pacing of the partner. So there.

Mike Hendrix (30:04)
Can I just interject? mean, just in defense of the partner, aren't there times in the workflow where they have to wait on a reply from Google?

Adam Jaffe (30:15)
There are certainly times where we need to enable things on our end. I would say where we typically see partners take time is when they're building into, it's not so much building into Google, but more on their end of how are they presenting this to their user? Are they adding notifications in their app? Are they getting explicit updates? Is there a flow to create? And so I don't mean to suggest that it's a slower engineering team or something like that, but there are.

Every partner approaches this differently in how they are integrating it into their system. And so that can sometimes mean that these times just vary. I would say, I think you mentioned the word backlog. I don't know that there's such a backlog. It's more that we know that our partners have big roadmaps. Sometimes there are...

competing priorities on these roadmaps. We think there's a lot of value in this integration, and so we hope that we can get really high on that roadmap, but we know that there's a lot of competing priorities. And so it's on the partner really to kind of figure out where does this fall into that. And of course, depending on the size of the team and what those priorities look like when they get to the service, we can verify.

Mike Hendrix (31:38)
Okay. Fair enough. Kathleen, I want to talk about golf courses that have historically been great with their Google profile, right? So they, they love their business profile and they put specials up there, et cetera, et cetera, but they use a tee sheet company that does not plan really to integrate with, with a Reserve with Google.

And the golf course I'm thinking of is Jacaranda. I'm wearing a Jacaranda logo today from their Tee Commerce store. It's a great golf course, great complex, golf complex in South Florida. And they do a great job with their Google profile. But I don't believe their tee sheet intends to do the Google Reserve work anytime soon. And I won't even mention the tee sheet name because it doesn't matter for the question.

How will Jacaranda's local search results, success if you will, be impacted if all the golf courses around them have the Google, have the book online button lit up, so to speak, and they don't. How do you think that'll affect Jacaranda's local search?

Kathleen Oshima (32:49)
Well, I think reiterating what Adam said, I think the different scheduling providers have different priorities. We encourage all of them to bump this integration to the top of their priority list because we think it's actually really beneficial for both the golf courses and golfers themselves.

Mike Hendrix (33:06)
And

for the record, just I agree with you. I think everyone should get this done, but we know, you know, there's 35 plus reservation systems. We know there's a couple that probably will not. I'm curious to know like what, so then what's the downstream impact?

Kathleen Oshima (33:23)
Sure, yeah, so I think what we were talking about before, we're actually not supporting what we consider to be categorical search. So if you're searching across golf courses, we're not surfacing tee time availability at that point. So if you're just searching for like golf courses near me or tee times near me, we actually don't support that type of search right now. The only place where these book online buttons or the tee time module are showing up are when you search for a specific course. So I think

in a case where a golf course does not have this integration, when users get to that page, the unfortunate effect is going to be that they're not able to find that book online button or the tee time module. And so, as I was mentioning before, the easier we make it for users to find the information they're looking for, the more likely they are to actually complete the actions. so, I mean, we obviously don't have this data on any specific

course, the chances are sometimes users might say, I don't know how to book this online. Generally speaking, again, we know people like to do things online. People don't really like making phone calls or having to search through external sites to figure out how to do something that should be simple. And so we see this across the board, even with restaurants as another example. Some people just like to make a reservation and know they can go to a place.

That might be the decision making factor for them of which restaurant they choose to go to. And so that could be the case in golf as well of like, I can't book online, maybe I'll just go to this other course. But that's all a little bit hypothetical because obviously the user can still get to the course's website or make a phone call, whatever they need to do to actually complete the booking.

Mike Hendrix (35:13)
Agreed. Definitely could get to the courses website, but let's back up for a second because I want to make sure I heard you correctly. If I search for golf courses near Miami, Florida, I personally do see many book online buttons as I scroll through the results. Okay. So if I search for golf courses near Miami, Florida, golf courses near Charlotte, what a

and I see all these results on the left hand side, all these different golf course locations. I do see the book online button. Were you saying I should not be seeing that button?

Kathleen Oshima (35:48)
No, you won't be able to do sort of like like T times near me and sort of and see all the slots the the golf the 2.0 integration

Mike Hendrix (35:57)
Sure. Understood. But let's go back to Jacaranda for a second. Because, because listen, when I say golf courses near Miami, Florida, I don't know exactly the algorithm or just really almost the workflow that Google uses to serve those back to me. What I'm wondering about for Jacaranda is if they never do light up or their provider never does light up the book online button. Will Jacaranda maybe

not be included in my search results as much because really it's not, you know, it's not transact, they can't, they can't facilitate transactions in that world. And maybe that hurts their search results.

Kathleen Oshima (36:38)
Yeah, all right.

Adam Jaffe (36:40)
What

you're saying is like, is there a penalty from Google of not enabling the booking and

Mike Hendrix (36:45)
Or we

could say they don't get the bonus of having the button, right? We don't have to think about it as a penalty. We could say they don't get a couple added bumps because they do have that transactional feature.

Kathleen Oshima (36:56)
Yeah, so in general, the way sort of like our search ranking works is a giant black box. So I think neither Adam nor I could answer what exactly is going to happen when one thing is different or one field isn't filled in. But I will say one of the things that does generally impact ranking is how engaged users are with your business profile. So if you're searching for golf courses,

and users are really drawn to the ones that you could make an online booking on, you know, over time. And again, this could be kind of a long time scale. Your result might kind of drop off just because people aren't engaging with it because, that's what we use as like one of our signals, one of, I mean, again, a million. like the full Google profile could counterbalance this. I really couldn't say.

But yeah, like that could be one of the signals of like, you know, users actually aren't engaging with this result. Maybe it doesn't need to be so prominent because the other ones are getting more engagement. you know, yeah, one way to counteract that is fill out your profile, make sure you're getting like fresh reviews that you have updated, you know, hours and all the other information.

Mike Hendrix (38:10)
and make sure you reply to reviews, right? People love it when the operator replies to reviews. That's always been, I think, an important best practice. Okay. So let's talk. Here's another, you know, challenge I can see coming up. So in my data, I have almost 3,500 golf courses in North America that have a book online button today. Right? So that's great. I mean, that's thousands and thousands of golf courses.

Kathleen, because of the work that you did that this is awesome, right? I mean, this is, think a great thing for those golf courses. One point of curiosity, because we know this happens about 12 % of golf courses each year, change tee sheets. What happens if a golf course is using provider A and by the way, their button also does not point to any other aggregators. Their button only points to the booking engine from provider A.

And they, and so then the, you know, through the normal course of business, the golf course decides to change booking providers. How does Google learn of that? How does the button get updated? I, and, and I will say, I asked this question because we have a handful of these already in California where we saw the button is pointing to the provider that they're no longer using.

So this is in real life. And so I'm curious, how does Google learn about this? How will you manage it going forward?

Adam Jaffe (39:43)
Yeah, I can take that one. So we are told by the scheduling provider to enable this booking functionality for a merchant. So let's say you're using one GMS as your booking provider. You switch GMSs. We won't know that necessarily. But what will happen is that GMS that you had a relationship, you'll no longer have that relationship. It will be removed from their feeds. no longer be sending that to Google.

And then hopefully this new provider that you're working with has also done the integration and you can enable it with them. So it's really up to you when you or the golf course are making that decision to kind of look and make sure is this new provider that I'm working with, do they have this integration set up and will they be able to enable this for.

Mike Hendrix (40:34)
Okay, Adam, the golf course operator can't even really notify you about that, right? The golf course operator is going to have to rely on the golf management system, the GMS as you call it. They're gonna have to rely on the GMS provider to alert Google that, there's been a change. Correct or not correct?

Adam Jaffe (40:56)
That's correct. know, our scheduling providers agree to a certain set of terms when they do this integration. And that is that if there is no longer an active relationship with that merchant, they're pulled from the integration. So our scheduling providers do this when a merchant changes provider. So what will happen is in the course of that data feed that they're sending us updating, that merchant will no longer be coming through that soon. Okay.

kind of happens naturally. But again, it's on the side of the scheduling provider. It's not through Google kind of choosing who your new provider is.

Mike Hendrix (41:35)
But just for specifics, even though there's no inventory coming through the existing feed, if I'm saying that correctly, that doesn't actually set off a bell at Google that says something's wrong, we have to fix this. You will be waiting for the new GMS provider to alert you of the relationship they now have with the golf course.

Adam Jaffe (41:56)
Yeah, we you know there there may be a course that is just saying we no longer take online bookings and we haven't signed up with a new GMF so we we don't know what the course intention is. We would rely on is that scheduling provider has to tell us hey we're working with this course. They want to enable it and so we're we're in a way for that.

Mike Hendrix (42:14)
Okay, okay. It's kind of a bummer for the user experience, right? They click the button and it goes to a dead page or something, but understood.

Adam Jaffe (42:21)
The button will be there. So the button will be removed if there's no... We wouldn't want to lead a user to a dead page, so if that provider is no longer working with the merchant, and they're no longer enabling that functionality for that merchant, the button goes away.

Mike Hendrix (42:38)
okay. I'll hit you up offline. mean, I have cases where it's been like that for 45 days, where the button is going to a dead page, but I can we can wait, I can follow up with you offline on that.

Adam Jaffe (42:49)
That

would be great. I we have quality checks that happen in place to make sure that these links are active and working. But obviously, there are millions of these links. And so we may not catch all of them. But by and large, we rely on the scheduling provider to represent their relationship as either existing or not existing.

Mike Hendrix (43:12)
Understood. So Kathleen, you know, everybody in tech, seems like talks about AI. And I am curious to know, in your work as the project manager here and, you know, just related overall in these different reservation exposures that you have,

Where does AI sit in all of this? Will this completely change over the next 24 months or 12 months because of AI or where does AI factor in to some of this specific user experience?

Kathleen Oshima (43:49)
That's a complicated question. And yes, in six months, it will be a different answer. I can guarantee that. I think, at least in the case of this booking integration, we were starting with nothing. And so the very basic thing we did was really not relying on AI, just relying on these partner integrations to bring content to where it didn't exist before.

And so I would say like this initial version and set of features is pretty maybe old school in the ways of tech. But as we're looking into sort of how we can improve the experience, we know things like, I think we're using AI for pretty much everything, but things even just like quality checking, making sure that the links are active, the price data is accurate, that we're getting actual real key time slots and.

not ones that have disappeared or something. We'll be integrating all of that. use AI constantly in any sort quality checking. That's not really visible to users, but it's very important on our side to make sure that we're showing the most accurate results. I think beyond that, there's a lot of different ways we can go with it. We know that we can give users more helpful insights, just even around like...

it's helpful to know when a course releases their tee times. And that's not always apparent, especially in the modules that we're showing. You can't book this more than 14 days in advance, or these all sell out within 30 minutes of being released. All that kind of stuff is stuff we're really interested in bringing to the users just to give them more insights and education around what is important to know when you're booking a course here, or something like...

Yeah, don't know. Users are very price sensitive. So anything that we can do to extract more information just around how pricing works at courses or if there are specific deals or packages or any of that kind of stuff, you know, we would love to bring some of that to the golf experience. We don't have an exact roadmap yet, but I think, you know, we are excited that AI basically makes a lot of us a lot easier than it used to be. And we don't have to rely on these, you know, kind of hard coded feeds coming at us.

Mike Hendrix (46:16)
Right. I can imagine this is will blow people's minds that are golfers that are listening, but you all have Spanish Bay available with a book online button and Spanish Bay is part of the little group of courses out of Pebble Beach. I can imagine AI getting to a place where it would say,

this golf course that is so hard to book who, sells out immediately has three tee times available right now. And they get surface to the top or something, you know, which would be an amazing experience for the user, right? That like, my goodness, I was searching for a tee time and look at what popped up. That would be, that would be incredible. But, but again, I understand what you're saying too. In six months, this will be completely different. So, so I guess it's just, we're just going so fast right now.

Adam, one item that you and I have talked about that also I think other people have talked about and it's come up is the concept of the book online button going directly to the golf course website. Again, with the reservation option there, but directly to the golf course website. I don't think that happens today.

Is that something Kathleen or Adam, is that something that you could envision happening in the future? That the, the golfer or potential booker would not land on a page hosted by the booking provider, but would indeed land on the golf course website itself.

Adam Jaffe (47:47)
Yeah, we want that book online button to lead to a scheduling page. So there are other ways to navigate to the website. Right above the book online button, you'll see there's a website button that you can go directly to the course website. And so we really want that book online button to lead to the scheduling page to remove that friction of I'm landing on the website, now I have to hunt to book now or I have to figure out where the booking is.

We do see that many first party booking providers will lead to the scheduling page that is kind of within the course's website. They can do it that way. Some of them do it, whether if they host it on their site, they do it that way. It's up to your scheduling provider whether or not they want to link to the course's website. It just depends on how they do it.

Mike Hendrix (48:39)
So this, okay, that's, that's interesting. So the scheduling provider could provide you all a URL that is not in their domain. It's actually in the golf courses domain and, you know, assuming like, and there's going to be some amount of trust there that the URL they provide you will actually go to a page that facilitates bookings. But, but you're saying if the provider gave you that URL, you would accept that URL.

Adam Jaffe (49:05)
Yeah, that's so through the integration process there will be at some point where we will vet the links that they're pulling or pushing to us and so that's how we would ensure that but yeah we you know it's up to the scheduling provider what page they want to lead the user towards. Some of them you'll see will lead to the booking page within a course of website. Some of them to your point have their own domain and then the booking goes there.

So it's not really our decision, it's up to the booking provider.

Mike Hendrix (49:37)
Interesting, interesting. I've not found, again, like I said, we've got about 3,500 courses that we, I've not seen that yet where it actually goes to, and I know some operators, believe it or not, think it goes to their website and they'll say that publicly. But then when you dig in, you realize, yeah, it's not exactly your website. It's your, it's your provider's website, but that will be great to see. If a provider ultimately gives you a domain that is the golf course domain, that that'll be cool to see.

Okay, well, listen, I thank you guys so much for coming on. I think this is a great development for operators and great development for golf. But honestly, there are some people that look for golf courses that don't know what a tee time is. They're interested in getting involved with golf and starting to become a golfer. And they're not aware that tee times exist.

This, this development is, good for that, but it's also great for the golf. You know, there are golf courses just for listeners. There are golf courses that do not have websites that now have a book online button because of Google. I think that's amazing, Adam. mean, I think that is amazing. and so that's, you guys have done and are doing a great, great service for golf. I'm sure it's good for you too. It's good for your user. get that.

But I think the golf courses and these businesses are really benefiting. So I tip my cap to you guys.

Adam Jaffe (51:10)
Yeah, we appreciate that. I think we feel very welcomed by the golf community. And so I think one of the most exciting things for us has just been getting to engage with golfers and golf courses and golf course operators. And it's been really exciting for us to hear all of the ways that they have found this useful to them. And so that's really exciting for us. And what I would convey is like, we would love your feedback. So the more that

that you all can share with us about how this is working for you, what things you'd like to see, how we can make it easier. We're listening to all of that.

Mike Hendrix (51:48)
Well, I'm happy to put something in the show notes. How does somebody give you feedback?

Adam Jaffe (51:54)
I would say a great place would be maybe they can share that with you and then you can share that with us. you got it. your point, I don't know that we have an official channel, but so we would kind of rely on the relationships that we've been making in the golf ecosystem.

Mike Hendrix (52:09)
Well, to do that. So again, Kathleen, thanks so much for giving us time. Adam, thank you so much for setting it up with Kathleen. That was super nice of you to do. like we say to a lot of people that come on the show, we're rooting for you. And we think what you've built is amazing. And we hope it only gets better from here. So thanks a lot for doing it.

Kathleen Oshima (52:30)
Great, thank you so much.

Mike Hendrix (52:31)
Okay, thanks.

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