Cruising the courses: golfers now find cruising an attractive alternative to resort vacations - Cruise Guide - escorted golf tours and instruction on cruises - Directory

Cruise Travel, Jan-Feb, 2003 by Jim Kerr

The first time I lugged my golf clubs aboard a cruise ship, fellow passengers smiled in amusement and a lady incredulously asked: "Is there a golf course aboard the ship?" Somehow, it didn't seem like a fit, and few cruisers back in the 1980s connected golf with cruising.

Since then, however, cruise lines have added thousands of new berths on dozens of new ships, putting them more and more into fierce competition with land-based vacation attractions and popular resort activities such as golf. More than six million golf vacationers from the U.S. alone spend several billion dollars annually on golf-related travel. I like to travel, cruise, and play golf, and my own cruise vacation plans usually call for plenty of shore activities, including drives along lush tropical fairways shaded by volcanos, putts on greens overlooking the sea, and approaches through valleys cut by glaciers.

The compatibility of golf and cruising has become obvious to anyone who does both. Clubs are delivered to your stateroom with luggage and sit at the ready for whenever you decide to play. Tee times and transportation are arranged either by ship personnel or onboard golf tour operators working with the line, eliminating any language problem or communication foul-ups. Instruction, practice sessions (sometimes with elaborate equipment and simulators), and even tournaments are often provided by onboard pros. But best of all, you can play several courses in a variety of venues over a very short period of time without ever schlepping your clubs through airports or on buses. I once played five courses in four days on Bermuda, and five courses in seven days on different islands in the Caribbean. I've hacked away on myriad courses from Anchorage to New Zealand, Finland to Mallorca, Acapulco to Cabo --all while enjoying every other aspect of cruising.

Today virtually every cruise line has some form of golf program or accommodation process to lure and assist golfers at all levels of play. After several years of experimentation, some partnerships between lines and golf tour operators have faded, while others have bloomed. And although some cruise lines that pioneered golf, like American Hawaii Cruises, have either gone out of business or downgraded golf efforts, others have taken the little white ball and put it in play around the world.

Royal Caribbean Cruise Line launched the first comprehensive golf program with "Golf Ahoy!" I remember driving balls off the fantail of the old Sun Viking on a 1986 Caribbean cruise, and playing with the captain at the Carambola course in St. Croix. Hitting balls off a ship is no longer permitted, but with more than 60 courses on dozens of islands to choose from, the Caribbean still makes geographical sense, and today more cruise golf is played here than anywhere in the world. I've played at least two dozen courses in both the Eastern and Western Caribbean, mostly on cruises. A few years ago I even wrestled my clubs into a bobbing tender from Windjammer Barefoot Cruises' Polynesia as I headed off to challenge the lush and mountainous Four Seasons' course on Nevis.

RCCL was also the first to offer pre- and post-cruise golf packages in Florida and Puerto Rico along with opportunities to play 21 different courses on eight itineraries. Nevertheless, cruise passengers were not always warmly welcomed on some of these courses, and not all of the courses were up to usual American standards, a situation which has much improved since those early days.

The new Cozumel Country Club, for example, may be the first course ever designed and built specifically with cruise passengers in mind. It is the island's first and only golf course, a $12-million Jack Nicklaus-designed project that opened all 18 holes in November 2001. The course is owned and run by ClubCorp International, a golf resort operator with such prestigious properties in the U.S. as Pinehurst and the Greenbriar. Mike Feild, director of operations for ClubCorp in Latin America, says he expects 20,000 rounds of golf will be played on the Cozumel course in 2003, 45 percent of them by cruise-ship passengers.

"It was built with them in mind," says Feild. "Carnival makes six to seven calls a week, along with other lines such as Holland America, Celebrity, NCL, and Disney. The total number of passengers arriving in Cozumel in 2003 is expected to be 1.8 million, not to mention 700,000 crew-members, many of whom also play golf."

This is a far cry from the past, when some lines were discouraged by the unavailability of tee times for passengers, as well as courses that were either substandard or erratic in their maintenance. In the past decade, improvements have been made on many Caribbean courses, with new ones having opened in popular destinations such as Aruba, Barbados, and Belize--where passengers are flown to a spectacular island course. Mexico, where not long ago golf was only for the elite, has many new resort courses along both the Caribbean and Pacific coasts. Puerto Vallarta, for example, which had one course 20 years ago, now has six, including two opened in 2001 by ClubCorp.