A First Golf Trip to Myrtle Beach: How to Not Drown in 80 Courses

Most destination golf trips on this site start with a resort: pick the property, then figure out which of its two or three courses to play. Myrtle Beach breaks that model entirely. There is no single resort to anchor a Myrtle Beach trip, because there are somewhere between 80 and 90 public courses spread across a 60-mile stretch of South Carolina coastline, depending on which local organization is doing the counting. The problem here was never finding a good course. It's stopping yourself from trying to play all of them in one trip.

The market is bigger than the marketing makes it sound

The Myrtle Beach Area Golf Course Owners Association counts 80-plus public courses across the Grand Strand; Visit Myrtle Beach's own site counts more than 90. Nobody reconciles the two numbers because nobody needs to: either figure is more courses than a one-week trip can responsibly play, and the gap between them is a rounding error at that scale.

The volume shows up in the numbers that actually move. Golf Tourism Solutions, the industry group that tracks tee times across the market's member courses, reported 2.73 million rounds played in 2025 across 64 member courses, averaging 42,668 rounds per course for the year. That's a 2% dip from 2024, the first pullback after several years of post-pandemic growth, but green-and-cart-fee revenue still rose 2% over the same period. The market is playing slightly fewer rounds and making more money doing it, which is the fingerprint of a region that has moved from posted rate cards to dynamic, demand-based pricing the way individual resorts elsewhere on this site already have. Price your trip on live rates close to your dates, not on a number you saw in a brochure.

The region markets itself as "The Golf Capital of the World," a slogan it holds as its own registered mark rather than a factual ranking. Treat it as branding, not a claim to verify.

How to actually pick, instead of trying to see it all

With 80-plus courses and no single resort forcing a shortlist, the fastest filter is the one the local course owners already run every year: the Myrtle Beach Area Golf Course Owners Association names a Course of the Year annually, voted by the same operators who run the other 79. It's an industry group grading its own members, so read it as a credible insider short list, not an independent ranking, but it's a genuinely useful tiebreaker when every course's own marketing says the same thing about itself.

Beyond that, the practical filter is geography, not architecture. The Grand Strand runs 60 miles from the North Myrtle Beach courses down through Myrtle Beach proper to Pawleys Island and Murrells Inlet in the south, and a course 45 minutes down the strand is a different logistics problem than one five minutes from your hotel. Pick a base, then pick courses that keep you within a short drive of it, rather than chasing individual course reputations across the full length of the coast.

What a trip actually costs

Package pricing across the market runs $400 to $1,200-plus per golfer depending on season, course selection, number of rounds, and lodging quality, with most multi-round group trips landing in the $700-$1,000 range. Winter is the value season here the way it is at Palm Springs in the opposite direction on the calendar: off-peak specials have run as low as $293 per golfer for three nights and three rounds at quad occupancy, which works out to under $100 a day for a bed, a cart, and 18 holes. That's a genuinely different trip, financially, than the same three rounds booked in April or October.

Every one of those figures is a snapshot from a market that has already told you it prices dynamically. Get a live quote for your actual dates before you build a budget around a number from this article or anyone else's.

Getting there from DFW

Fairways and Miles plans from Dallas-Fort Worth, and Myrtle Beach is one of the more direct connections on the destinations covered here: American flies the DFW-to-MYR route nonstop, 5 times a week, in about two and a half hours, with one-way fares starting at $284 as of early September 2026. American is the only carrier flying it nonstop, so if a search turns up a connection instead, check the nonstop dates again before you book it.

The wrap

Don't try to build a Myrtle Beach itinerary the way you'd build a Bandon Dunes or Pinehurst one, around a single operator's course lineup. Pick a base along the Grand Strand, lean on the Course of the Year list as a tiebreaker when you're stuck, price your rounds live rather than off a brochure rate, and stop planning once you've got more good courses on the list than days to play them. That's the actual constraint here, and it's a good problem to have.