Most groups plan a golf trip by picking courses. They find the famous ones, work out which are close enough to each other, and book whatever tee times are left. Then they go, and they have a decent week, and they come back saying it was a lot.
The courses were never the problem. The order was — and, more often than anyone admits, the size of the group.
Start with how many are going
Before the courses, before the dates, before anything: decide how many people are coming, and be willing to keep that number small.
Eight is the sweet spot. Two foursomes. Everyone plays with everyone across a week without effort. One van, one dinner table, one conversation. Tee times are easier to get because you’re asking for two, not four.
Twelve works if it’s couples — six pairs, and the dynamic is different because nobody’s trying to organise twelve golfers.
Past twelve golfers, something changes. The group stops being a group and becomes a collection of smaller ones. Dinner needs a private room. The van becomes two vans. Tee times get spread across ninety minutes, so the first group finishes while the last is still on the back nine, and nobody’s together at the end of the day. And the course can’t always take you at all — plenty of good clubs won’t release four consecutive times to visitors.
There’s a second filter that matters as much as the number. Everyone has to be happy playing with anyone. If there’s a pair in the group who always play together, or someone who’s only really friends with one other person, the week develops a seating plan — and the people at the edge of it notice.
The best trips are eight people who are genuinely tight, where any foursome is a good foursome. That’s worth more than a bigger group at a better course.
The best version of this we’ve seen
A group cut itself down from around sixteen to eight, and two of the eight played together twice a week at their own club all year. On the trip, they deliberately kept out of each other’s foursomes.
Their reasoning was simple. They get eighty or ninety rounds together a year. This week was the only chance to play with the other six.
That’s the thing a golf trip is actually for, and it’s the clearest argument for keeping the group small. At eight you can make that choice. At sixteen you don’t get to — you’ll barely play a round with half of them, and it’ll be decided by whatever the tee sheet allowed rather than by who you wanted to spend the week with.
If the list is creeping toward sixteen because it’s awkward to leave people out, the honest move is two trips rather than one large one. Everyone has a better week.
Why sequence matters more than selection
Eight rounds in seven days is a physical event. Links golf especially — you’re walking, often into wind, on ground that doesn’t forgive a tired swing. By Thursday most groups are stiff, sunburnt and quietly counting holes.
What determines whether that happens isn’t which courses you chose. It’s whether the week was built with any thought about fatigue, driving, daylight and weather — or whether it was assembled from whatever tee times were available.
Get it right and nobody notices, which is the point. Get it wrong and the trip becomes a logistics exercise with some golf in it.
The day you land
Almost every group gets this wrong, and it’s the easiest thing to fix.
You’ve flown overnight. You’ve slept badly upright. You’ve collected clubs, found the cars, driven ninety minutes on the wrong side of the road. And someone has booked the best course on the itinerary for two o’clock that afternoon, because it seemed a shame to waste the day.
You will play it badly and you will barely remember it. That’s an expensive way to tick something off.
Put something forgiving on arrival day. A shorter course, a resort course, somewhere that doesn’t demand much. Or nothing at all — a range session and an early dinner is a perfectly good first day, and the group that does it plays better all week.
Save the course everyone came for until day three or four, when legs have adjusted and everyone’s swing has turned up.
The last morning
The other end matters too, for a different reason. The final round is the one people talk about on the way home, so it should be somewhere memorable — but it also has to fit around a flight.
An early tee time, a course near the airport, and clubs already packed. What you’re avoiding is the group that plays a great last round and then spends it checking watches.
Driving, and where it lands in the day
People look at distances between courses. Fewer look at when the drive happens.
A ninety-minute drive before golf is fine. The same drive after eighteen holes in wind, with four tired men in a van, is a different experience entirely — and it’s how groups end up eating dinner at nine thirty and getting up at six.
Where possible, structure the week so the long drives are transitions between bases rather than daily round trips. Three nights in one place, three in another, beats seven nights somewhere central with two hours in the car every day.
And build in lunch. A week of sandwiches in a van is a small misery that accumulates.
The weather day
One day of your trip will be worse than the forecast promised. On the coast of Ireland or Scotland this isn’t pessimism, it’s arithmetic.
The mistake is deciding what to do about it at breakfast that morning, when everyone’s tired and nobody wants to be the one who calls it off.
Decide before you leave. Know which round is the one you’d move, where the more sheltered alternative is, and what a half-day looks like. Most courses will shift a tee time later in the day if you ask early — far fewer will if you call at eight in the morning.
Worth saying plainly: playing links golf in rain and wind is not a failure. It’s often the round people remember. What ruins a day is being unprepared for it — no waterproofs, no spare gloves, no plan.
The costs nobody quotes you
Green fees are the number everyone compares. They’re rarely the number that surprises people.
Caddies
Some courses are walking-only. Some expect caddies, some effectively require them. The fee is usually paid on the day, often in cash, and the gratuity on top is a matter of local convention rather than a posted rate.
Across eight rounds for four players, this is not a rounding error. It’s worth knowing the number before you go, and worth everyone carrying the right currency rather than discovering a cash machine problem on the first tee.
Getting the clubs there
Three options and no universal answer. Flying with them is cheapest and carries the most risk — a delayed bag on a seven-day trip with eight rounds is a real problem. Shipping ahead costs more and usually works. Renting at the course is fine for a casual player and miserable for anyone who cares about their own clubs.
What matters is deciding deliberately rather than everyone doing something different and one person’s bag not arriving.
The extras
Transport between courses. Dinners, which on a golf trip are longer and more expensive than anyone budgets for. And the pro shop, where a group of eight will reliably spend more than they planned.
The group itself
The range of abilities
Every group has a scratch player and someone who plays four times a year. Nobody talks about it in advance, and then on day two the higher handicapper is holding everyone up on a course that’s too much for them and having a wretched time.
Three things fix it. Choose at least one course that’s genuinely playable for everyone. Agree tee boxes before you go rather than on the first tee. And pick a format with handicaps in it — a scramble or a stableford — so the weaker player is contributing rather than apologising.
The pairings
With eight, this mostly takes care of itself — two foursomes, rotated daily, and by the end of the week everyone has played with everyone. Build the sheet before you go anyway. Left to sort itself out over drinks the night before, the same four end up together every day and somebody’s quietly on the outside.
It takes twenty minutes and it’s the single thing most likely to make people want to come again next year.
The people who aren’t playing
Plenty of golf trips include spouses and partners with no intention of playing thirty-six holes. Left unplanned, they spend a week in a hotel room while everyone else has the trip.
They need their own itinerary, planned with the same care as the golf. It’s also, incidentally, what determines whether the trip happens again.
How far ahead to book
Further than feels reasonable. The famous links courses release tee times roughly a year out and the good ones go quickly — particularly morning times in the summer months, and particularly for larger groups.
Twelve to eighteen months for Ireland or Scotland in high season. Less for the American sandbelt resorts, though the best lodging there books early too.
Here’s the part that matters for sequencing: if you book late, you take whatever times are left, and the order gets decided for you. Booking early isn’t about getting the courses. It’s about getting to choose what you play when.
ʻOhana Getaways plans private group travel, including golf trips at home and abroad. If you’re the one who organises it every year, we’d be glad to take it on. Book a call or read more about how we plan golf.
ʻOhana Getaways is an independent travel advisor of Fora Travel.
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