Golf travel returns: what changed after eighteen months away and what didn't

Golf travel came back in 2021 faster and more emphatically than almost anyone in the industry predicted. By April, Faro was seeing near-normal passenger numbers on UK routes. By June, our enquiry volume was running at 160% of our pre-2020 peak. By October, the Algarve was busier than any autumn I'd experienced since 2016.

What changed: the pricing. Eighteen months of closed operations followed by a surge of demand produced, at some courses and hotels, rate increases that were significant and, in some cases, disorienting. Quinta do Lago South, which had been €175–190 in 2019, was quoting €210 for late 2021 bookings. Leopard Creek had moved its visitor green fee structure. Some of the Belek properties had repriced their all-inclusive rates upward to capture the pent-up demand.

Not all of it stuck. By early 2022, several course and hotel rates had come back toward pre-Covid levels as the surge normalised. But the premium on the very top-end courses — Quinta do Lago, Leopard Creek, Old Head, Monte Rei — held, and in my assessment, most of those increases reflected underlying value rather than pure opportunism.

What didn't change: the quality. Courses that closed properly during Covid — maintaining the greens through reduced-opening programmes, using the closure to complete renovation work — came back in better condition than they'd been in immediately before closure. Monte Rei in October 2021 was the best I'd seen it. Leopard Creek's 2021 season was, by the accounts of everyone I spoke to there, one of their finest.

The client who'd been waiting two years: a client who had booked a Leopard Creek trip for October 2020 before the world closed down had rescheduled twice. In October 2021 he finally went. He was 68. He'd been playing golf for 44 years. He called me from the 18th green and said: 'This is the best round of golf I've ever played.' I think about that call regularly.