Golf Trip

The destinations, ranked

Seven of our cities are worth flying to for golf. The rest have courses, which is not the same thing.

Best first. This is an opinion, not a spreadsheet. If the top pick fits your dates and budget, stop scrolling.

The tee sheet decides where you sleep

At Pinehurst, courses 2, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 9 are open to resort members and overnight guests only. The public gets 1, 3, 5 and The Cradle. So if the trip is built around playing No. 2, the lodging decision is already made, and it was made by the tee sheet rather than by anyone comparing hotel prices.

That pattern repeats at most destination golf resorts. Stay and play is not an upsell, it is access. Price it against a cheaper hotel plus public green fees and the cheaper hotel often loses on the only thing the trip is actually about, which is the course everyone flew in to play.

Ask one question before booking anything. Which courses do we actually want, and can we get on them without staying on property.

Golf is played in fours

Eight works. Twelve works. Ten is a problem.

Tee sheets run in foursomes. A group of ten is two foursomes and a twosome, and courses generally will not put a fifth in a group. So the odd two either go out ahead of everyone, wait behind everyone, or get paired with strangers. On a trip where the whole point is that you are all together, that is worse than it sounds.

If the number is flexible, land on eight or twelve. If it is not, book the odd pair the earliest or latest slot deliberately rather than discovering the problem at the first tee. Name one guy per foursome who owns that group's tee times. The alternative is four texts and no bookings.

The one thing everyone screws up

Booking the flights first.

Flights are the flexible part. Green fees at a destination resort are not, and neither is the room that unlocks them. Groups pick dates around cheap fares, then find the course they came for is full on the only two mornings that work.

Lock the tee times, then buy the flights around them. It is the reverse of how everyone does it and it is the reason the good trips get the 8:40 off the first tee and everyone else gets 1:50 in the heat.