The Girls' Golf Trip Is Getting the Buddies' Trip Treatment

At 6 a.m. on Solheim Cup mornings, Debbie O’Connell, the founder of Golf Positive, is at the gate, wearing a Wonder Woman cape and ready to sprint for first-tee seats on behalf of her travelers. In the Netherlands last month, she had 61 of them.

The buddies’ golf trip has had decades of resort packages, tour operators and marketing built around it, and the girls’ golf trip is now drawing the same kind of investment. Pine Needles’ women’s camps fill to waitlists, Sea Island and Casa de Campo run dedicated women’s weekends, and Titleist just hosted its first women’s invitational at a Florida resort.

On-course participation by women in the U.S. hit a record 8.1 million in 2025, up 45% since 2020, according to data from the National Golf Foundation. Women and girls accounted for 52% of net participation growth over that span and now make up 28% of on-course golfers, up from 20% in 2012.

Golf tourism is already a $30 billion global industry, and the travel trade is paying attention. At the International Golf Travel Market in Cannes this week, the commercial case for women’s golf gets its own session on Thursday, with panelists from Medi8 Golf, the Ladies European Tour and Women&Golf digging into women golfers’ spending, loyalty and the barriers keeping them off the course.

But many properties still haven’t caught on. O’Connell, an LPGA Class A professional who has run Solheim Cup trips since 2011, put it bluntly. “They’re behind, for sure,” she told Big Swing Media.

The Playbook So Far

The options on the market fall into a few models, each betting on different elements women want from a golf trip.

The legacy program: Pine Needles in Southern Pines, North Carolina, built by LPGA founding member Peggy Kirk Bell, runs the Ladies Golfari, a women’s camp Bell founded, with major winner Donna Andrews leading instruction. The February and April 2026 sessions were waitlist only, and single-occupancy rates for May 2027 start at $3,945. 

The instruction weekend: Sea Island’s Women’s Golf Getaway Weekend pairs Top 100 teacher Gale Peterson with senior instructor Chrissy Felton. Packages for 2027 dates start at $2,295 per person and include 14 hours of instruction and a “Nine and Wine” with the staff, but accommodations are booked separately.

The luxury tour: The Experience Golf, an authorized provider of Old Course tee times, announced The 1867 Club on Oct. 8, a five-night, four-round women's trip to St. Andrews set for June 12-17, 2027, and capped at 16 guests. Packages start at £7,800 per person (roughly $10,400) and include rounds at Kingsbarns, Dumbarnie and the Jubilee Course building to a guaranteed tee time on the Old Course, with every night at the Old Course Hotel. The name marks the year women first putted on the Himalayas course at St. Andrews.

The packaged tournament: Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic will hold its third annual Ladies Golf Cup Oct. 28-Nov. 1, a four-night event the resort bills as designed by women, for women. Packages start at $2,689 per person in a double room and $3,319 for a single, covering lodging, meals and drinks, three tournament rounds across its Pete Dye courses — including Teeth of the Dog — a massage and airport transfers. A non-golfer rate starts at $1,829, and former LPGA Tour player Kris Tschetter is the special guest. 

The brand as host: Titleist ran its first Team Titleist Women’s Invitational at Streamsong Resort in Florida, Oct. 2-4, open to women of all abilities. 

The specialist operator: Companies such as Women’s Golf & Travel sell women-only itineraries, including a January trip to Cabo with private transfers, a welcome dinner and three days of golf.

The community trip: Fore the Ladies, a nonprofit working to bring more women into the game, ran an all-inclusive weekend at Sea Island in 2025.

The Premium Traveler

Golf travelers are already premium customers, with VisitScotland research finding that golf tourists spend about 3.5 times as much as a typical visitor, and that half of the women golfers visiting Scotland described themselves as luxury or holiday golfers. Those numbers are similar in Ireland — according to Fáilte Ireland, Ireland’s national tourism authority, the average golf tourist spends three times what the average leisure tourist spends. Golf generates approximately €717 million (roughly $830 million) annually for the Irish economy — about €1 in every €200 spent on the island.

Women’s spending also runs well past the green fee, O’Connell said, through the pro shop, the wine list, the best restaurant on property and the spa. “Your finances will increase if you market to women,” she said.

The harder problem is keeping women in the game long enough to book. NGF research shows women lapse at higher rates than men, and their conversion rate from beginner to committed golfer is less than half of men's. Very few female core golfers say they feel recognized by the golf businesses they patronize, per the NGF. 

Built for the Group Chat

Survey data and operators point to the same priorities. A 2026 Golfbreaks survey found female golfers put more weight on value, resort-style destinations and relaxed social time than on golf-only holidays.

Logistics are a big part of the sale. Many women would rather not plan a group trip themselves, O'Connell said, so her packages handle everything from airport pickup on. "They just have to show up."

Pricing shows how wide the market runs. O'Connell's weeklong overseas Solheim packages cost $4,500 to $5,500 per person, with tickets, transfers, two rounds, breakfast and two parties included. She has seen competing Solheim packages in Spain top $6,000. Sea Island's instruction weekend, by comparison, carries a $2,295 event fee before lodging.

The cleanest comparison sits at a single resort. Casa de Campo's Ladies Golf Cup runs four nights and three tournament rounds, starting at $2,689 per person in a double room. Its Twosome Championship, open to all golfers but with tee rules written for male amateurs, runs six nights and five rounds from $3,829 per person in a double room. Per night, the two land within about $35 of each other.

The pitch differs more than the price. The Twosome sells volume: 90 holes, skins, daily lows and a $200-per-player cash pool paid back as prizes. The Ladies Cup sells connection and Caribbean luxury, with a massage, Stableford scoring and daily group games, and bills itself as designed by women, for women.

Who travels shifts with distance. Domestic trips tend to be girlfriends' trips, O'Connell said, while overseas trips draw more couples. Destination also drives volume. Her 2023 trip to Spain drew 116 travelers, nearly double her usual 60, and according to O’Connell, this year's Bernardus crowd had fewer Americans than any Solheim she has attended.

Programming has to flex, too. O'Connell adds a non-golfer package to every trip for fans who come only to watch, and she warns against assuming every woman wants a wine tasting.

Where Tourism Boards Stand

Tourism boards are further behind, O’Connell said. She called their interest in women’s golf travel developmental and couldn’t name a board running a dedicated campaign, except possibly the Bahamas.

The benchmark is seven years old. Ahead of the 2019 Solheim Cup at Gleneagles, VisitScotland launched a campaign aimed at female golfers and billed it as a first for a national tourism organization. At the time, women made up just 12% of Scotland's golf visitors, and the agency later signed the R&A’s Women in Golf Charter.

Spain's Costa del Sol has taken the event route. In March, Turismo Costa del Sol signed on as a co-sponsor of the Santander Golf Tour, a Spanish women's pro circuit, and it advertises the region as a champion of women's golf. Managing Director Antonio Díaz framed the deal as a tourism strategy, calling golf one of the Costa del Sol's most important segments.

The Bahamas made a similar bet earlier. Its Ministry of Tourism put $1.5 million into the first Pure Silk-Bahamas LPGA Classic in 2013 and projected at least a fourfold return. In 2020, it teamed with LPGA pros on a virtual closest-to-the-pin contest.

O’Connell called the Solheim Cup the “anchor” for women’s golf trips and the “greatest women's golf sporting event that you'll ever go to.” But hosting a Solheim Cup doesn't guarantee a destination is ready for the travelers it draws. O'Connell's group found Spain set up for it in 2023: two hotels on the Mediterranean about 15 minutes from Finca Cortesin, a rental-club supplier that outfitted half her golfers, and carts, caddies and pull carts on offer. Organizers also sold reserved first-tee seats, then released any left empty 10 minutes before the opening match.

The Netherlands was harder. Her group stayed in Utrecht, about 50 minutes from Bernardus, at a five-star hotel she said her travelers loved. On the course, she scrambled to find rental sets, carts were scarce and no clubs she played offered caddies, private ones included.

Bourbon Country Is Next

The next test is in Kentucky. The 2028 Solheim Cup matches run Sept. 8-10 at Valhalla, and tickets went on sale Sept. 14, after the matches in the Netherlands wrapped. When the event was announced, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg pitched it to golf fans and women's sports fans around the world, and Louisville Tourism pointed visitors to its bourbon distilleries.

O'Connell has already booked Louisville. Her travelers are already asking about the bourbon tour, and she has the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory and the Muhammad Ali Center on her list, too.

She has one request for the organizers: sell reserved first-tee seats, the way Spain did. So far, they haven’t. Until that changes, O’Connell will be in line at 6 a.m. again, cape on, ready to run.