One of the first series I posted on this site recapped a golf trip I made with my father, uncle, and cousin to California to play Pebble Beach among other fantastic golf courses. It was one of the first times where I started focusing on points and utilizing credit card signup bonuses to reduce costs.
At the time I kept highly detailed records of the expenses for that trip and tracked what we spent and it’s been a great window into how we did a bucket list golf trip on a shoestring budget. It’s also shown where we could have been more efficient with the points and better leverage the status I now have.
The 6th anniversary of the trip just passed and my family is starting to itch to go on another golf trip once COVID-19 is under better control. The trip, if it occurs, will likely be in a year and will be highly dependent on the state of COVID-19 as my dad will be in his later 70’s and of higher risk despite being in fantastic shape for his age.
General Trip Requirements
To plan a trip of any type, it’s much easier to get started if you have some general requirements, such as length of trip, the general time of year, destination or activity, and the number of people.
We’re not looking to stay in high-end locations and we’ll be focusing on using points and miles where it makes sense, but won’t be spending points where there isn’t decent value (i.e. we won’t be spending 50,000 Marriott points at a location where cash rates are $100/night). That said, if the value for using points is only slightly less than what we’d normally use points for, we’ll consider using points to reduce cash costs.
For this trip, we are looking to go for about a week to our destination and focus on playing golf. We are interested in hitting at least some bucket list courses and want to plan to play golf every day, though we may schedule a rest day.
We’ll also be looking to stay in hotels where we can get free breakfast either through status or brands that offer breakfast to everyone. We will also look for opportunities to upgrade (using points) to suites where we can all stay in the same room. The prospect of us all staying in a presidential suite vs two generic hotel rooms has a certain draw to it, especially if costs the same.
Also, since we’re looking at a late fall/winter timeframe for the trip we’ll be looking at locations in the southern part of the US. We’re not looking to play in the snow!
Traveler Type
With any trip, you have to know the people going on the trip. When you hear “golfing trip with your buddies” that could drastically different things to different people. Some groups will focus on golf, others on entertainment. Some will want a more luxury vacation while others will be fine with a budget conscious trip.
For us, based on our previous Pebble Beach trip, our group is focused on golf. We’ll eat at McDonald’s every day if that means we can play nicer courses. That said if we can leverage points and miles to stay in nicer places we’ll do that. We also like each other, which may sound weird, but we get along really well. On our previous trip, we spent most of the trip together hanging out in each other’s rooms, many times having connecting rooms.
We don’t mind spending time in the car to get to different courses so we’ll be moving from location to location to hit the best courses. On any trip, we’ll likely change hotels a couple of times to get a new home base to work with.
We’ll also want to play as much golf as we can, so we’ll likely schedule a course each day. We won’t play multiple rounds a day, though. Given the time of year, we’re planning for the days will be short anyway so that would be tough. We are all early risers so we will likely try to play earlier in the morning as tee times allow.
Sample Itineraries
In the following posts, I’ll detail three example itineraries we are considering as starting points to planning our trip. These are examples and are likely first passes. The final itinerary, if we go on it, could be drastically different.
To help compare the itineraries I’ll be outlining estimated costs based on information I could readily find online. Many hotels and airlines don’t book that far ahead so I’m just guesstimating those costs entirely. I’m trying to get the idea of the relative cost of each trip so we can see which trip has the best bucket list to the wallet ratio that we are all comfortable with.
We’re not even sure we’ll be going or exactly when but it’s fun to plan!
Enjoy!
Tomatico Travels 