What do you really want in a golf trip? If your answer is golf, golf, then more golf in one spot, sometimes followed by a wee bit of extra golf, we have you covered.
Golfweek’s Best ranks courses around the world by various categories, ranging from modern courses to the best in each state. One of our most popular rankings is the top 200 resort courses in the U.S.
Any of the layouts on the list would make for a great getaway. More than three dozen resorts have two courses on the list, always begging for a comparison between layouts over a nice cold drink and dinner after a full day of golf.
But if you’re looking for more, keep reading. Because 10 resorts are home to three or more courses on Golfweek’s Best ranking of top resorts in the U.S. From coastal Oregon to inland Florida, these destinations have the holes — and the pedigrees — to keep golfers swinging for days.
Six of these resorts have three courses ranked among the top 200. They are Big Cedar Lodge in Missouri, Firestone Country Club in Ohio, Pebble Beach Resorts in California, the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail in Alabama, Sea Pines in South Carolina and Streamsong in Florida.
Two of these are not traditional resorts. The first is Firestone, which for the most part is a private members club. But Firestone offers stay-and-play packages open to the public. That qualifies it as a resort based on Golfweek’s Best standards in which any course that offers tee times to the public, even if the club is mostly a private facility, is deemed to be public-access.
The other in question is the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, which offers golf at 11 sites around the state. Because all the facilities are managed under one umbrella and offer great opportunities to bounce from one site to another with relative ease, we opted to include the Trail on this list.
Next up are the resorts with four courses ranked among the top 200 — rarefied air. They are Destination Kohler in Wisconsin (Whistling Straits and Blackwolf Run are two clubs, each with two courses, that are part of one resort) and Reynolds Lake Oconee in Georgia, which is a sprawling resort and residential community.
Only two resorts in the U.S. have five courses among the top 200 in the U.S.: Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon and Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina. Both of them are bucket-list destinations that every golfer should see, hopefully more than once. They offer all the golf most players would ever want on one vacation — playing one round on each course would take days, and one round on each course is never enough.
The resorts with three or more ranked courses have gone about their development in multiple ways. Some were established more than a century ago and have added courses through the decades — these resorts often feature courses designed by multiple architects, offering an array of styles and architectural features. Others feature several courses by one designer, with the resorts sticking with the architects who proved to work best for them.
Either way, you can’t go wrong with a trip to any of these locations listed on the following pages. Included for each resort are its top-200 courses listed with their average rating on a scale of 1 to 10 as assigned by Golfweek’s Best rater program, their designers, the years they opened and their rankings on various Golfweek’s Best lists. We hope you enjoy perusing these elite resorts, both on these pages and in real life.
And it’s worth noting, there is one more resort destination that is very likely to join this list of 10 in the coming years. Pine Needles in North Carolina, not far from Pinehurst Resort, operates three courses, two of which are on the 2023 list of top 200 resorts: Pine Needles (No. 47) and Mid Pines (T-35). The company’s third course, the recently renovated Southern Pines, didn’t have the requisite number of votes to qualify for this year’s list but is almost a lock to appear on the list in upcoming years.
