We all hate no-shows. Especially in golf. Golf takes 4 hours to play, 2 hours to travel to and fro, eating and showering, warming up and socialising. Whole event takes up 8 hours, a good day's work. You can imagine how pissed golfers would be if they showed up at the golf course and their playing partners either told them last minute they couldn't make it, or not show up all together. We at Deemples also understand the frustration. This is especially when on Deemples, you're mostly playing with other golfers for the first time. There are pros and cons. People can either be more punctual and courteous, or the total opposite and just not show up at all, because of lack of accountability.   For the golfers and especially game hosts on Deemples, we want to make sure you have the best experience from your game as possible.  

A few things that you can watch out for no-shows:

  1. See that the joiner has a valid local phone number. For example, if you're in Malaysia, and you see a joiner with an Indonesian number, there is a chance it could be a drifter user who's just joining games for fun.
  2. Number of rated games. If the joiner has less rated games, or close to zero, he/she might not be super familiar with the app, and accountability is normally lower too.
  3. No responses/interactions on the game chat. Either drifter user, or chat notifications are turned off.
  4. Call the phone number listed for the joiner, and no answer. Pretty much a sign to just remove the joiner, and make space for others.
 

What you could do to verify the authenticity of a specific user:

  1. Chat with the user in the Deemples game chat. If the user chats back, and says that he/she's coming to golf, you're pretty sure they'll show up.
  2. When a joiner doesn't respond in the chat, as host, you can click on their profile, view their phone number, and give them a call.
  3. If none of these work, the best way would be to leave them a message in the chat, and let them know they'd be removed from the game to make way for other joiners if you don't hear back from them by xxx time.
  4. Remove them from the game. There'll be a remove user button (designed as a red X button) on the joiner's profile. Click on it, and you will be prompted to leave a message to the unresponsive joiner. Be nice and leave a message so that they know they can contact you if they needed to.
  Of course, we always assume that golfers don't not show up, and not notify for no good reason. For all you know, someone died, they died on the way to golf, too drunk to wake up, or any other emergency happened at home or in their life that they couldn't reach out to notify. Or it also really could be their phone turned off, muted, disabled chat notification on their device, deleted Deemples, etc. Many reasons, so we hope for the best, and try to prevent the worst.  

Actions that we at Deemples, are taking, to reduce this no-show occurrence:

  1. Improving chat notifications, ensuring everyone gets notified.
  2. Verifying users that are real or fake.
  3. In the future, helping golf clubs/golf game hosts accept payment upfront, therefore if there is no payment by a certain date, the host can remove the joiner. (We're excited about this!)
  We hope this will help everyone reduce no-shows to golf, especially if it's through Deemples. Let's uphold some high etiquette standards for golf, so that we can all have an enjoyable and equitable game.