If the Old Course at St Andrews is on your list for 2027, there is one date that matters more than any other: the opening of the Advanced Tee Times Application. If you are traveling as an independent golfer, it is your main route to an Old Course booking that’s confirmed long before you leave for Scotland.

Here’s the part that catches people out. What you are applying for is not a bare tee time, it is the Swilcan Package — a two-course deal covering the Old Course plus a second course of your choosing, for a maximum of four golfers. Your place also carries a £65 food and beverage credit, a £25 retail credit, and two buckets of balls at the Golf Academy. For scale, the 2026 season priced it at £700 per golfer in high season and £530 in the shoulder months.

The window typically opens in late summer for play the following season, and it stays open roughly two weeks. You apply through the St Andrews Links site.

After that it’s a lottery. St Andrews Links draws a ballot for each category to set the order of allocation, so your application is an entry and nothing more, and demand runs well past what the tee sheet can hold. You’ll hear by email by the end of October either way, which still leaves you months to build a Scotland itinerary around a confirmed booking.

The application is short, but it asks for real detail on every player in your group, so it is worth gathering all of it before the window opens:

• Full names for everyone in the group, up to a maximum of four golfers.
• Each player’s home golf club or recognized golf association.
• Handicap information for each player. The maximum permitted is 36, for men and women alike.

Chasing down a friend’s handicap index the week the window closes is a great way to miss it altogether.

Missing out is the ordinary outcome, not a failure, and you’ve still got two options once you’re actually in St Andrews.

The Daily Old Course Ballot draws roughly 48 hours before play and takes groups of two, three, or four golfers. Entries close at 2 p.m., results are generally posted later that same afternoon, and you can enter online, by phone, or in person at the Old Pavilion. You’ll need names, home clubs, and handicaps here too, and duplicate entries for the same day get disqualified.

If you are traveling solo, you can’t enter the daily ballot on your own, but the Singles Daily Draw exists for exactly that situation.

There is a complication you will want to know about before you plan. The 155th Open returns to the Old Course from 11 to 18 July 2027, the thirty-first time the championship has been played there, and the course closes for a stretch ahead of it while the R&A and St Andrews Links Trust run a program of enhancement and restoration work. Fewer playing days against sharply higher demand means the tee sheet empties faster than it would in an ordinary season.

That’s the whole argument for applying the moment the window opens. A confirmed Old Course time is the anchor of a Scotland trip, and everything else gets easier to place once that one date is fixed: the other courses, your hotels, the days you spend nowhere near a golf course. If 2027’s the year for you, tell me while the ballot is still open rather than after.

• •St Andrews Links — Advanced Tee Times Application (Swilcan Package)
• •St Andrews Links — Old Course Ballot
• •The Open — The 155th Open, St Andrews 2027