Tim--
Would be happy to explain this to you. I ran the NYC market for GolfNow for 2+ years before leaving to join a friendlier 3rd party distribution startup called Forelinx. I won't go into the details as commercialization of GCA is taken quite seriously here, but anyone interested in learning about it should feel free to reach out to me directly.
GolfNow uses the "barter" model--which is to say they offer the course operator the chance to trade an underutilized tee time in exchange for some shelf space in the giant digital WalMart that is GolfNow. The operator can put his inventory up on GolfNow at any rate he sees fit, but on the one "barter" time (all 4 players) GolfNow gets to price it however they want and collect 100% of the revenue generated. There are some exceptions to this (some courses have price floors or stack their trade times during the week, etc) but on the overall this is generally how it works. Some courses pay an extra trade time for technology (tee sheets, websites, etc.) or additional marketing.
The fact that GolfNow gets to price the tee time is where the rate integrity issue comes into play. A part of my job was to price the barter times in the NYC market and there was heavy pressure from above to try to make sure the barter round utilization percentage was as high as it could be. If a barter round went unsold, I generally had some explaining to do and had to justify my actions in pricing the time.
This naturally created an incentive to make sure that any unsold times on the day of play were dropped to the lowest possible rate. As you could imagine, course operators are not wild about watching their $60 rounds sold at $10 without their even getting a dollar of the $10. Some of this has changed recently as trade pricing is now much less manual than it used to be.
The resentment you are feeling from the operator comes mostly from the fact that you haven't paid him a dime--all of the revenue from a barter time goes straight to GolfNow. This is (mistakenly in my view) not at all obvious to the consumer--and frequently results in the customer berating the golf course operator when they are unwilling to offer the "Hot Deal" rate to the consumer at a different time.
I dealt with a lot of course operator resentment as well during my day-to-day work with GolfNow. Barter times in the NYC market could generate anywhere from $5,000-$35,000 per tee time in revenue for GolfNow--which is more than almost any vendor gets paid for anything when it comes to a golf course operation. Figures like that generate certain performance expectations from the operator--who feels like if GolfNow is getting $35,000 in value from the partnership that the course should get back equal value.
The hard part (from my perspective as the GolfNow rep) is that GolfNow's revenue is entirely incremental. The operator knows that 100% of the $5,000 to $35,000 that we were making off each of those trade times is NEW revenue to GolfNow and therefore a real increase in the bottom line for GolfNow. I could not (with any measure of intellectual honesty) say the same about the revenue that GolfNow generated for the course. It is impossible to determine the percentage of GolfNow revenue that would not have been made by the course but for GolfNow.
In many cases, a lot of this revenue is simply "channel shifting"--the customer that used to book through the phone is now booking through GolfNow. This is why you see the following phenomenon--the golf course operator who is being told that GolfNow generated $200,000+ worth of revenue for him while looking at his own P&L and seeing no REAL increase at all.
Moreover, operators rightfully worry about the degree to which barter rounds are displacing rounds that used to generate revenue for the course. Let's say that you're a golf course that gave me a trade time worth $30,000 and that 2/3rds of the revenue from that trade time is revenue that the course would have made but the consumer decided to book the cheaper trade time instead. Now, from the operator perspective, not only have you sold a bunch of rounds at well below-market rates--but you've done it in a way thats hijacked $20,000 that you otherwise would have made on your own. Now, the operator needs to see at least $20,000 in incremental revenue from GolfNow just to break even.
I could talk about this subject at length (and already have) but I'll close by pointing something out to any operator who cares about this. Unless you are stuck in a contract situation, you generally have a lot more leverage than you might think you do. GolfNow reps face a lot of scrutiny from above when they lose a golf course client (especially a big one) and will get the approval to make a lot of accommodations if it helps "save the business."
As stated, 100% of the barter round revenue they generate is "new" revenue to GolfNow. That also means they LOSE 100% of that revenue when the course quits. This is not true for the course at all--if you quit, you may well keep 95%+ of the revenue that GolfNow was "generating" for you.
I'm happy to discuss GolfNow with anyone who is interested or answer any questions people might have about GolfNow. It's a really polarizing topic in the golf industry and I'm happy to (within applicable legal boundaries) share my experience from the inside with anyone who asks.