Myrtle Beach is the default American golf trip for a reason. Enormous course count, packages built specifically for groups, cheap beds, short flights from most of the East and Midwest, and a shoulder season where you can play four rounds for what one costs at a resort.
The volume is also the trap. Faced with a hundred options, most groups let a package company pick for them and end up playing four forgettable courses in a row.
Go in the shoulder season. Not summer.
March and April, or late September through November. That's the trip.
Summer on the Carolina coast is hot, humid and full of families. The golf is cheaper because nobody sane wants to play in it. Spring and autumn give you decent temperatures, firmer turf and the pricing that made Myrtle famous.
Late February is the genuine bargain if your group will accept the risk of a cold, wet week. It's a real risk. Some years it's glorious.
How to actually pick courses
Use a simple structure rather than trying to rank a hundred golf courses:
- One splurge round. The one everybody talks about afterward. Pay up for it, play it midweek, book it early, and put it in the middle of the trip rather than day one.
- Two solid mid-tier rounds. This is where the trip actually lives. Well-conditioned, fair, memorable enough.
- One cheap and cheerful. Deliberately. It's your hangover round or your last-morning-before-the-airport round, and it should cost almost nothing.
Four rounds over four days beats six rounds over four days, every time, for every group over about thirty-five.
Cluster geographically
This is the most common mistake and the easiest to avoid. Myrtle Beach sprawls a long way north to south, and packages will happily send you forty-five minutes in one direction on Tuesday and forty-five the other way on Wednesday.
Pick a stretch and stay in it. North Myrtle, the central strip, or down toward Pawleys Island. Book your beds inside your chosen cluster. You'll add an hour of sleep and lose an hour of driving every single day.
Pawleys Island and the south end skews toward the better, quieter golf and away from the noise. If your group is more about the courses than the strip, base down there.
Getting there
Myrtle Beach International (MYR) takes plenty of direct flights and sits right in the middle of everything. Charleston is about two hours south, Wilmington about an hour and a half north — both worth checking if the fares are much better.
From most of the Midwest it's a long day's drive, roughly ten to twelve hours. Splitting the drive both ways costs two half-days and a cheap motel, and it's the difference between arriving fresh and arriving wrecked.
The practical bit
- Best months
- March–April, late September–November
- Cheapest
- Late winter, with real weather risk
- Avoid
- July and August. Heat, humidity, crowds
- Airport
- MYR. Charleston and Wilmington as fallbacks
- Structure
- One splurge, two solid, one cheap. Four rounds, not six
- Base
- Pick one cluster and stay in it. Pawleys for quieter golf
- Group size
- Eight is ideal. The whole market is built around foursomes
The thing that makes it work
Myrtle Beach isn't a bucket-list destination and it doesn't pretend to be. What it is, is the easiest place in America to get eight men to for four days of golf without anyone needing a second mortgage.
That's a genuinely valuable thing. The trip you actually take beats the trip you keep planning, and Myrtle is the one your group will actually agree to.
Just pick your own courses, cluster them, and go in April.