Every golfer keeps a list. The courses you'll get to someday, the buddies trip you keep almost booking, the one week a year that's yours and the group's and nobody else's.
This is our list. Ten golf trips worth the flights, the tee times, and the group text that never stops. One of them, you can win outright.
1. The Monterey Slam (California)
Start with the one you don't have to save up for.
The Monterey Peninsula holds the highest concentration of great golf in the country, a two-hour drive south of San Francisco where the Pacific hammers the cypress and the fog burns off by 10. The Monterey Slam is five rounds across five of its courses, and the headliner is Pebble Beach, the No. 1 public course in America and host of seven major championships. You'll also play Spyglass Hill, the Robert Trent Jones Sr. beast that Golf Digest ranks among the top public courses in the country, plus Spanish Bay, Del Monte, and Bayonet Black Horse.
Seven nights at The Inn at Spanish Bay, a full set of clubs, premium apparel, and $30,000 in cash for a group of four. This is the bucket-list golf vacation.
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2. Pinehurst (North Carolina)
The cradle of American golf, and the trip every serious golfer owes themselves once.
Pinehurst sits in the North Carolina Sandhills with ten courses on property, anchored by Pinehurst No. 2, Donald Ross's 1907 masterpiece. It hosted the 2024 U.S. Open, where Bryson DeChambeau held off Rory McIlroy, and the USGA has made it a permanent anchor site with Opens booked into the 2040s. The turtleback greens repel anything less than a perfect shot, and they'll do it to you all week.
Fifteen minutes up the road is Tobacco Road, the late Mike Strantz's wild, blind-shot fever dream carved out of an old sand quarry. Book both. They're the two ends of what golf architecture can be.
3. Kiawah Island (South Carolina)
Forty-five minutes south of Charleston, the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island Golf Resort is the hardest resort course you can walk up and play.
Pete Dye built it for the 1991 Ryder Cup, the "War on the Shore," and it's hosted two PGA Championships since, including Phil Mickelson's win at 50 in 2021. Alice Dye's decision to raise the whole course to the top of the dunes means every hole stares straight into the ocean wind, and the wind never picks a direction and sticks with it. Ten of the holes run along the Atlantic. You'll take the beauty home and the scorecard to therapy.
4. Scottsdale (Arizona)
The desert golf getaway that runs on sunshine and doesn't quit.
Scottsdale is where the buddies trip goes to feel like a proper vacation, and the anchor is TPC Scottsdale, home of the WM Phoenix Open and its coliseum 16th, the loudest hole on the PGA Tour. A few minutes out, We-Ko-Pa gives you two Sonoran Desert courses with no homes, no roads, nothing but cactus and horizon, and the Coore and Crenshaw Saguaro course is one of the best public tracks in the state.
Golf all morning, pool all afternoon, and enough restaurants to keep four hungry golfers happy for a week.
5. Myrtle Beach (South Carolina)
The all-time buddies trip. No pretense, no dress-code anxiety, just golf.
Myrtle Beach built the whole American golf-trip template, with roughly a hundred public courses stacked along the Grand Strand and golf packages tuned for exactly this. It's the place you play 36 in a day, split a condo six ways, and settle the week's bets over cheap beer. Nobody's checking your handicap. Everybody's having a better time than they'll admit at home.
6. Las Vegas (Nevada)
The golf trip that turns into something bigger by dinner.
Las Vegas is the rare golf destination where the course is only half the itinerary. You get high-end desert layouts within twenty minutes of the Strip, tee times built around late nights, and a city that assumes you're here to spend. It's the golf vacation for the group that wants the round and the rest of it too.
7. St. George (Utah)
The scenery trip that fills everyone's camera roll.
St. George in southern Utah has become one of the best golf getaways in the West, built on red-rock canyons and coral sand. Sand Hollow is the draw, a course that runs its back nine along the edge of actual cliffs, and Golf Digest keeps putting its holes on greatest-hole lists. Just up the road, Black Desert hosted a PGA Tour event in 2024, the first in Utah in more than 60 years. It doesn't look like golf anywhere else in the country.
8. The Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail (Alabama)
The best value in American golf, full stop.
The Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail is a chain of public courses spread across Alabama, more than two dozen layouts at a fraction of what a single round costs at the marquee resorts. It's the trip for the group that wants to play a lot of golf and argue about which stop was best on the drive home. Nobody flies out for the luxury. They fly out because you get more golf per dollar here than anywhere.
9. PGA West and the California Desert
Where the pros froze and you get to try anyway.
Down in La Quinta, PGA West is a bucket-list stop for anyone who grew up watching desert golf on TV. The Stadium Course is another Pete Dye brute, notorious enough that the tour pros once revolted against it, and it's open to you. It pairs with a desert full of options, including private benchmarks like The Quarry at La Quinta that set the standard for what desert golf can be.
10. TPC Sawgrass and Ponte Vedra (Florida)
End on the most famous shot in golf.
TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach is the home of the PGA Tour and The Players Championship, and its island green 17th, the Pete Dye and Alice Dye par 3 that's swallowed more balls than any hole in the game, is a shot every golfer should hit once. You'll be terrified. You'll do it anyway. That's the whole point of a golf trip.
Pick your trip
Every one of these earns the flight, the money, and the time. Pinehurst and Kiawah Island for the history and the pain. Scottsdale, Las Vegas, and Myrtle Beach for the buddies trip that writes its own stories. St. George and the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail for beauty and value. PGA West and TPC Sawgrass for the courses you've watched your whole life.
And the Monterey Slam for the one you don't book. You win it.
You've earned the shot. Now go earn the trip.
Four friends. One trip you'll never stop talking about.
