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"Every year, twice a year, I'd find myself doing the same thing."

Someone in the group chat would say "right, where are we going this year?" and somehow - without anyone officially deciding - it would become my problem.

Sixteen guys. Four different cities. Four different airports. Different budgets, different handicaps, different opinions on whether we wanted championship courses or hidden gems. Some flying Tuesday, some Thursday. Half of them needing club hire. All of them with very strong views on the hotel.

I'd spend weeks buried in browser tabs. Google Flights in one window, Booking.com in another, a golf course directory in a third, a spreadsheet trying to make sense of it all. Cross-referencing flight times with tee time availability. Checking whether the hotel was actually near the courses or just near the airport. Working out whether the Budget option was actually worse than the Mid-Range or just on a different part of the coast.

It was, as I used to tell people, like herding sheep. Except the sheep all had opinions about green fees.

After the fifth or sixth time of doing this, I started thinking: why doesn't a tool exist that just does this for you? You tell it where you're flying from, roughly what you want to spend, how many of you there are - and it builds the plan.

So I built it.

What GolfTrip does

GolfTrip takes everything I used to spend three weeks doing manually and turns it into a 60-second AI-generated itinerary. Courses matched to your handicap. Hotels near the fairways, not the motorway. Budget, mid-range and luxury options compared side by side. Booking links for everything.

And if your group is spread across the country, you can add every departure airport and it accounts for all of them. It won't replace the group chat arguments about where to go. But it'll give everyone the information they need to actually make a decision.

The honest bit

GolfTrip was built by one person who got fed up planning golf trips for his society every year. It's in early access, which means it's genuinely being shaped by the people using it.

If something's missing, annoying, or broken - there's a real person on the other end who wants to know about it.

Get in touch

Have feedback, a feature request, or just want to say hello? We'd love to hear from you.

"Right, where are we going this year?" Six words. Said in the group chat. By someone who absolutely will not be the one sorting it.

If you're reading this, you're the one who sorts it. Nobody elected you. There was no ceremony. You just happened to be the organised one and now, year after year, that's your identity within the society whether you like it or not. The good news is there's a better way to do this than the spreadsheet-and-browser-tabs approach most people are still using.

Get the constraints before you get the destination

The number one mistake is picking a destination and then trying to make everyone fit around it. Go the other way. Before you mention a single place, find out who's actually coming, what they're willing to spend, and where they're flying from. Sixteen people rarely all live in the same place — you'll have a London contingent, a Manchester lot, and the one bloke who drives from somewhere near Inverness and considers that perfectly reasonable.

Once you know the budget range and the airports, the shortlist mostly sorts itself. This sounds obvious but it's the step most organisers skip, which is why they end up three weeks into planning discovering that four people can't actually afford what they'd already half-agreed to.

Give them options, not a question

"Shall we do Portugal?" produces thumbs up emojis and no decisions. "Here are Budget, Mid-Range and Luxury versions of an Algarve trip — which works for the group?" produces actual answers. People vote for specifics. They can't vote for a vague idea. Get three real options in front of them with actual courses and actual hotels named, and the conversation moves forward instead of going in circles for three weeks.

A deadline isn't optional

Group chats are where decisions go to quietly expire. Set a hard deadline for votes — "reply by Sunday or I'm assuming you're flexible" — and stick to it. The people who miss the deadline and then have strong opinions afterwards are a known phenomenon and you are within your rights to ignore them.

Flights and hotel before anything else

Book the things that get more expensive the longer you leave them. Tee times can usually be sorted closer to the date. Restaurants definitely can. But a flight that was £89 in November is £189 in January and sold out in March. Lock in the accommodation and flights, then work outward from there.

Collect money before you spend it

The organiser fronting four grand on a personal card and chasing people via WhatsApp for the next two months is one of those experiences that everyone laughs about afterwards and nobody wants to repeat. Get deposits before you book anything you can't cancel. The people who say "I'll sort you after payday" mean it entirely sincerely and will still owe you money at the airport.

Why we built GolfTrip

This exact process — the airport juggling, the three-tier comparisons, the voting that never quite happens, the chasing people for deposits — was taking up entire weekends. Twice a year, every year. GolfTrip does the research in about sixty seconds, the group voting happens in the app instead of a buried thread, and everyone can see the same information instead of fifteen slightly different versions of what's been decided. It won't stop someone changing their mind about flights for the fourth time. Nothing can fix that. But it cuts the rest of it down considerably.

"Portugal's better." "No it isn't, Spain's warmer in April." "You haven't even been to Spain." "I went to Marbella in 2019." The conversation happens at some point in every society. Here's an attempt to settle it properly.

Both are roughly two and a half hours from most UK airports, both have excellent courses, both have reliable sun from March through October. The difference isn't really about quality — it's about what kind of trip your group wants.

The golf

The Algarve wins on concentration. Quinta do Lago, Vale do Lobo and Penina are within about twenty minutes of each other, which means you can play three completely different world-class courses without a significant drive between any of them. That matters on a five-day trip. Costa del Sol is more spread out — Valderrama, La Cañada, Real Club de Golf Guadalmina are excellent but you'll be in the car between them more. Not a dealbreaker, just worth knowing.

Valderrama, though. If your group has any ambition to play genuinely iconic golf, the Costa del Sol has the edge there. It hosted the Ryder Cup in 1997 and it's still one of the best-designed tests in Europe. The Algarve has outstanding courses but nothing quite as historically significant.

After the round

Costa del Sol is the obvious choice if the group wants a proper evening out. Marbella old town, Puerto Banús, the restaurant strip around San Pedro — there's a lot going on and it doesn't all shut at 10pm. The Algarve is better for a group that wants excellent food and a civilised evening rather than a night out. Lagos and Vilamoura have good restaurants and decent bars, but it's a different energy to the Costa del Sol.

Cost

Green fees are broadly similar — budget around £80-100 for good courses, £150-200 for the marquee names at either destination in peak season. Accommodation is where the difference shows. The Algarve has more golf-resort packages that bundle accommodation and rounds together, which often works out better value for a society. The Costa del Sol has more standalone hotel and villa options, which suits larger groups who want space to spread out.

The actual answer

Golf-first, convenient, quieter evenings: Algarve. More to do off the course, iconic courses, livelier atmosphere: Costa del Sol. Neither is a wrong answer. We've had good trips in both and will keep going to both. The argument in the pub remains unresolved, which is probably how it should be.

"Just fly from Gatwick." Thanks for that. Very helpful from someone who lives in Surrey.

Most golf trip content assumes you're flying from London. Manchester Airport is actually excellent for European golf destinations — often better connected than people realise, usually cheaper than the equivalent London fares, and without the two-hour M25 experience beforehand. Here's what actually works from the North West.

Algarve — still the obvious first choice

Manchester to Faro with easyJet or Jet2, around two hours forty-five minutes direct. It's the safe choice for a reason — short flight, straightforward, world-class golf at the other end. We've done this route probably four or five times now and there's never been a complaint about getting there. Book early and the fares are genuinely good value.

Costa del Sol — similar distance, different trip

Direct to Malaga, roughly the same flight time. Multiple daily services from Manchester with several carriers. If the group wants more going on in the evenings alongside the golf, this is the better choice. The golf is excellent and Marbella is only forty minutes from the airport.

Scotland — less than an hour away

Manchester to Edinburgh is fifty minutes. You're at St Andrews in two hours from the gate. No passport, no currency, and links golf that most of the world would get on a plane for. For a long weekend it's almost criminally convenient from Manchester and most northern societies have never done it because it doesn't feel like a proper trip. It is.

Bilbao — the one that surprises people

Direct from Manchester a few times a week, under two hours. Northern Spain is dramatically cheaper than the Algarve or Costa del Sol — green fees, restaurants, accommodation, all of it. The golf in the Basque Country is excellent and largely unknown to UK societies because nobody thinks to look there. The food in Bilbao and San Sebastián is genuinely world-class. If your group has done Portugal and Spain and wants something different, this is the answer.

If the group isn't all from Manchester

Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield — everyone in the North has a vaguely different nearest airport and strong opinions about which one is actually convenient. The right answer is for people to fly from wherever makes sense for them and meet at the destination. It works better than it sounds and removes the "well it's cheaper for me from East Midlands" conversation that would otherwise go on for three weeks.

"I spent four evenings on this." That's how I described planning our 2023 Algarve trip to someone who asked. Four evenings. For a five-night holiday. That felt wrong.

The actual golf took twelve hours across three days. The planning took longer than that. Flight comparisons from four different airports, hotel searches, course availability, green fee research, trying to work out whether the cheap hotel was actually near the courses or just near the motorway. By the time I'd sorted it I was mildly sick of the Algarve before we'd even landed.

That's the problem AI travel planning is actually solving. Not the big philosophical question of whether AI is good or bad — just the unglamorous reality that sorting out a group golf trip used to eat your evenings and now it doesn't have to.

What it actually does well

The bit AI is genuinely useful for is cross-referencing a lot of variables quickly. Eight golfers, three different departure airports, a budget of around £1,200 each, somewhere warm in September — that's a twenty-plus search exercise if you're doing it manually and about sixty seconds if you're not. The output is a starting point, not a finished plan, but it's a properly informed starting point rather than just picking the first thing that looks reasonable.

What it doesn't do — and shouldn't claim to

The prices are estimates. That's worth saying plainly. AI-generated green fees and hotel costs are based on training data, not live availability. They give you an accurate enough ballpark to make decisions — yes this destination is broadly in budget, no that tier is too expensive — but you book the actual flights and hotels through the real providers where the live price lives. Anyone claiming their AI shows you real-time availability across every provider simultaneously is either not being straight with you or has a set of airline and hotel partnerships most startups don't have.

The thing that's actually changed

The more interesting shift isn't really about AI — it's about what sits between "do it yourself for free" and "pay a travel agent to do it." For golf trips specifically that gap has been pretty empty. A planning tool that does the research and comparison and then sends you to Booking.com and GolfNow to actually book, rather than acting as the booking agent themselves — that's the genuinely new thing. No agent markup in the price, no ATOL bonding headaches, just the research done for you.

Whether GolfTrip specifically is any good at this is something you can find out for free in about sixty seconds. The planning for our next trip took considerably less than four evenings. That's the honest measure of whether it works.

"Right, same again next year?" Before the transfer back to Faro had even left the resort, we'd already agreed on coming back.

We've been going to the Algarve as a society for six years now. Different hotels, different months, slightly different arguments about handicaps — but the courses stay largely the same because frankly, once you've played Quinta do Lago, Vale do Lobo and Penina, you've played some of the finest parkland golf in Europe. Here's an honest rundown of what's actually worth your money and what isn't.

Quinta do Lago South

The one everyone wants to play, and for good reason. Immaculate conditioning, wide corridors off the tee that make you feel like a better golfer than you are, and views over the Ria Formosa nature reserve that make you want to stop and take photos instead of playing. It's expensive — you'll be looking at £150-200 a round in peak season — but if you're only playing one marquee course, this is the one. Book direct and book early; tee times go months in advance in July and August.

Vale do Lobo Royal

The 16th hole. That's all you really need to know. It's a par 3 across two clifftops with the Atlantic below and it will either be the best hole you've ever played or the most expensive — depends entirely on whether you find the green or the sea. The rest of the course is demanding and varied, and the conditioning is consistently good. Slightly more character than Quinta, slightly fewer camera phones on the fairway. Our group has a love-hate relationship with it. We keep going back.

Penina Championship

Henry Cotton designed it and it shows — this is old-school Algarve golf, flat, tree-lined, strategic. Not as visually dramatic as the cliff-top courses but genuinely one of the best tests of accuracy in the region. Green fees are noticeably more reasonable than the marquee names, and if your society includes a few mid-to-high handicappers who find the exposed layouts punishing, Penina is kinder while still being excellent.

The honest bit about the Algarve

Peak season (July-August) is expensive, hot — genuinely uncomfortable hot for some golfers — and busy. September and October are the sweet spot. Same sunshine, emptier tee sheets, prices 20-30% lower. If your society has any flexibility on timing, go in October. You'll thank yourself.

"It's just a field." That's what someone in our group said before his first round on the Old Course. By the 17th he'd gone very quiet.

Scotland does something to you. It's not just the golf — though the golf is extraordinary — it's the whole thing. The cold, the wind, the way the light hits a links course at 7am when you're the only group on the first tee. If your society hasn't done a Scottish trip yet, you're overdue. Here's how the three main regions compare.

St Andrews — the pilgrimage

Getting a tee time on the Old Course is genuinely difficult. The ballot system means you can apply months in advance and still not get one. The locals call it character building. If you do get on, the experience is unlike anything else in golf — flat, featureless to the eye, deadly to the scorecard. The Swilcan Bridge photo is unavoidable and nobody apologises for it. The town itself is excellent for an evening — good restaurants, whisky bars, the kind of place that makes you want to stay an extra day. Book other courses on the St Andrews Links (the New, Jubilee, Eden) to fill the week; they're excellent in their own right and much easier to get on.

Ayrshire — Turnberry and Prestwick

Turnberry's Ailsa course is as dramatic as golf gets anywhere in the world. Perched on the Firth of Clyde with Ailsa Craig sitting in the sea beyond, it's the kind of course you have to see to believe. Expensive — proper resort pricing — but if you're going to treat the group once, this is how. Prestwick, a few miles up the coast, is the antidote: ancient, quirky, blind holes that would never get planning permission today, and a fraction of the price. Playing both in the same trip is the right approach.

East Lothian — the underrated one

Twenty minutes from Edinburgh and most people have never heard of it as a golf destination, which is precisely why you should go. Muirfield is there — one of the Open Championship venues, strict dress code, no buggies, no nonsense, and worth every penny of the green fee. Gullane and North Berwick offer outstanding links golf at sensible prices. You can fly into Edinburgh, be on a golf course within an hour and be back in the airport two hours after your last putt. For a long weekend, nothing beats it for value and quality.

"Did anyone bring the handicap certificates?" The taxi to the airport. Every single time.

Twelve trips in fourteen years. We've forgotten something on almost every one. The list below is everything we wish we'd had written down the first time — covering the stuff that actually causes problems, not the obvious things that everyone remembers anyway.

Before you book anything

Get firm numbers before touching a credit card. A WhatsApp "who's in?" produces an unreliable count. An actual message saying "reply by Friday or you're not on the list" produces a reliable one. Establish the budget range early — not everyone's in the same position, and finding out the hard way three weeks before departure is miserable for everyone.

Documents and admin

Every player needs their handicap certificate or WHS index printout — most European courses won't let you on without one, and they mean it. Check passport expiry dates; at least one person in every group discovers theirs expired during a recent name change or just hasn't checked in three years. Travel insurance that covers golf equipment specifically, not just general baggage. And if anyone's flying separately, make sure they know the tee time, not just the course name.

Equipment

Hire clubs at the destination if anyone's on the fence — they've got significantly better in the last ten years and lugging a bag through an airport is genuinely miserable. If you are taking your own, a hard case and a lock. Always. Budget airlines have a talent for finding soft bags. Check the airline's golf bag policy before assuming; some count it as oversized baggage, some have a specific golf rate.

On the ground

Shared minibus or individual taxis — sort it before you land, not in the arrivals hall. Tee time confirmation in writing, not just a verbal booking. Know the course dress code; some European clubs are stricter than you'd expect. Sort dinner reservations for at least the first night before you go — arriving hungry and disorganised after a long travel day when nobody's eaten properly since the airport is a guaranteed atmosphere killer.

The bit people always forget

Sort the Stableford scoring system and the side bets before you leave, not on the first tee. Twelve people arguing about whether it's gross or net while a group is waiting behind you is one of those experiences that stays with you.

"It's a bit Benidorm" is not something anyone has ever said about the south of Tenerife while standing on the fairway at Golf Costa Adeje with the Atlantic behind them.

Tenerife gets unfairly dismissed by golf travellers who lump it in with package holiday resorts. The south of the island is a genuinely good golf destination — reliable sunshine year-round, short flight from most UK airports, and a surprising spread of quality courses. The question is what you actually get at different price points.

Budget (under £800pp for 5 nights)

Perfectly achievable. Flights from most UK airports are cheap outside school holidays, and mid-range hotels in Los Cristianos or Playa de las Américas are solid without being exciting. Green fees at courses like Amarilla Golf or Golf del Sur are reasonable — you're playing decent, well-maintained layouts without paying resort prices. You'll eat well and cheaply in the local restaurants rather than the resort dining rooms, which is honestly often the better choice anyway. The golf won't blow your mind but it's good enough to justify the trip, and the weather in January or February when everywhere else is miserable makes the value obvious.

Luxury (£1,500pp+)

This is a different trip. Abama Resort sits on the west coast and is one of the more extraordinary hotel and golf experiences in Europe — Dave Thomas designed the course along a volcanic hillside, the holes descend toward the ocean, and the resort itself is the kind of place that makes you feel guilty about how good your life briefly is. Green fees match the setting. Paired with a night or two at a boutique hotel in the north of the island — where it's genuinely lush and green and completely unlike the south — and you have a trip that punches well above what Tenerife's reputation suggests.

The honest verdict

Tenerife budget trips are great value for winter golf. Tenerife luxury trips are genuinely surprising — Abama specifically is one of those places that converts people who thought they'd never go back. If the group budget is split — some want cheap, some want to splash out — a compromise at £1,000-1,200pp gets you good hotels in the south and green fees at the better courses. Nobody feels like they've been short-changed.

"We'll book it in January." We say this every October. We book it in March and the flights have gone up forty quid.

Timing a golf trip is two separate questions: when to travel, and when to book. They have different answers, and mixing them up is the most common way societies end up either in the wrong destination at the wrong time of year, or paying over the odds for something they could have had for less.

When to travel — by destination

Portugal and Spain: April-May and September-October. The summer months are genuinely uncomfortable — 35 degrees on an exposed fairway with no shade is not golf, it's survival. September is the Algarve at its best: still warm, courses emptier, prices lower. If you can only do summer, go early morning tee times and accept you'll be done by 1pm.

Morocco: March-April or October-November. Avoid July and August entirely — Marrakech in August is not designed for human activity of any kind, let alone sport.

Ireland and Scotland: May-September. You can play year-round but you're taking your chances with the weather outside those months. May is consistently underrated — long evenings, relatively dry, fewer tourists. September is often the best month on a links course anywhere.

UAE and Dubai: November to March only. April onwards is too hot to play. The winter season is excellent — warm enough, good courses, competitive package pricing as the operators compete for European visitors.

When to book

For a spring trip: book flights in October or November the year before. For an autumn trip: book in March or April. The sweet spot for European short-haul is roughly five to seven months out — before the algorithms notice demand picking up but late enough that schedules are confirmed. Booking the hotel two to four months out is usually fine; unlike flights, hotel rates don't always go up with proximity to the date and occasionally go down if occupancy is soft.

The one exception is peak July and August, where everything should be booked as early as possible because popular resort hotels and marquee courses genuinely do sell out.

"Five airports within an hour of central London and we still somehow end up arguing about which one to use." A tradition as old as the society itself.

London societies have the best flight options in the country and somehow manage to make choosing between them the most complicated part of the whole trip. Here's a sensible guide to the main destinations and how to actually get there without it turning into a two-week WhatsApp debate.

Portugal — the default, for good reason

Gatwick to Faro is two and a half hours and the Algarve is waiting at the other end. TAP, easyJet and Ryanair all fly it, which keeps prices competitive. If your group is split between south and west London, Gatwick is almost always the right call — easier than Heathrow and better served for the Algarve route specifically. Lisbon is worth considering if the group wants a city element alongside the golf: Porto is closer to some excellent northern Portugal courses that most Algarve-fixated societies have never seen.

Spain — more options than people realise

Costa del Sol via Malaga is the obvious one but not the only one. If half your group is in north London, Luton to Malaga with easyJet is often significantly cheaper than Gatwick. Stansted has good Spanish connections too. For something different, Bilbao in northern Spain is less than two hours from Stansted or Gatwick, has excellent golf, food that makes the Costa del Sol look like a motorway service station, and roughly half the crowds.

Ireland — underrated for a long weekend

An hour from almost any London airport to Dublin, Kerry or Cork. No passport. Golf that's genuinely world-class — Lahinch, Ballybunion, the K Club. The weather is what it is but a late May weekend in the west of Ireland on a links course with a decent group is one of the better experiences in golf. Prices have gone up but it's still better value than an equivalent standard of course in Portugal.

The airport question

If your group genuinely lives all over London and beyond, the right move is for everyone to book their own flights from their nearest airport and meet at the destination. The savings on not driving across London to consolidate at one airport often more than cover any difference in flight price. GolfTrip handles multi-airport planning specifically for this — you put in everyone's departure point and it optimises around it.

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