What we did during lockdown — and the list we made of every trip we'd been putting off

Golf stopped in March 2020. Golf travel stopped more completely — no flights, no hotels, no courses. For a business that exists to move people between airports and fairways, this was a novel problem.

I spent April making a list. Not a to-do list — a should-have-done list. The itineraries I'd been meaning to develop properly for three years but hadn't. The courses I'd heard about from other specialists and kept filing in a mental drawer. The clients who had asked me about South Korea, about Morocco, about the Azores, and whom I'd told 'we're working on that' without fully being true.

By May, the list had 23 items. By June, I had researched 11 of them in enough detail to begin building proper itineraries. By August, I had spoken to contacts at courses in Jeju, Morocco, and the Azores specifically.

The question I asked everyone I spoke to during this period: if you could only take one more golf trip, where would it be? The answers divided almost perfectly into two categories. The people who'd been to Japan said Japan again. The people who hadn't been to South Africa said South Africa. Nobody said Spain.

What that told me: the trips that matter most are the ones that provide an experience no other destination can. Japan's hospitality and course quality. South Africa's wildlife and the Leopard Creek experience. Vietnam's discovery quality. These are not interchangeable with Portugal, however excellent Portugal is.

When travel opened again in 2021, the first calls were almost entirely from people who had used the lockdown to decide that they were no longer putting things off. The bucket list trips — South Africa, Japan, Vietnam, the full links circuit — all sold faster in the first six months of 2021 than they had in any previous year. Eighteen months of enforced waiting had, for many of our clients, clarified the priority.

We came back from lockdown with a clearer portfolio and a longer list of destinations we're confident enough to recommend properly. The list that started in April 2020 is still the foundation of everything we've added since.