When to Book a Michigan Golf Trip

Why the windows exist

Two things drive this, and neither is complicated.

Courses release their next season on their own schedule, and most of it happens over the winter. There's no statewide date and no central system. Each property decides when it opens the book for the following year, which is why a group that assumes one rule for everything ends up late on the courses that open earliest.

The second thing matters more. Peak morning times go to the same groups every year. Outings, member events, and repeat buddies trips that already know the window claim the best Saturday mornings before those times ever reach the public. So when you call in April for a July weekend, you aren't seeing the full sheet. You're seeing what's left after the people who booked in January took theirs.

That's not a knock on anyone. It's just how the calendar works, and it's fixable by knowing when to call.

The fork that decides your booking order

Here's the part most planning advice gets wrong. There's no single right booking order. It depends on what your group cares about most, and one question sorts it.

Is this a trip about the courses, or a trip about the place? That's what I ask first, and most groups haven't decided until somebody puts it to them. The answer tells you what to lock down before anything else. This is how I build trips.

If it's about the courses, book the tee times first and sort lodging after. If the trip exists because you want to play Arcadia Bluffs, Forest Dunes, or Bay Harbor, those sheets are the scarce thing. The whole trip is built around getting on them, so everything else bends to what you can get. Lodging in those areas is a solvable problem once you know your rounds. The rounds are not solvable once the mornings are gone.

If it's about the place, book lodging first. This is the bigger half of the groups I talk to. They want a Charlevoix trip or a Traverse City trip, and the courses are the reason to be there rather than the reason to go. In those towns you're not only competing with golf groups. You're competing with every family, wedding party, and vacationer who wants the same summer weekend, and the house is the harder thing to get. There's good golf all over this state and you can almost always put together a strong lineup. The right place to sleep, for your group size, on your dates, is a much shorter list.

The Arcadia exception

Arcadia Bluffs sits outside both answers, and it splits two ways.

If you want to stay on property at Arcadia, that lodging goes first, ahead of everything, even on a courses-first trip. It runs on a longer clock than the tee sheet does and needs to be booked a year or more out. On-property is the one case where the room outranks the round.

If you're staying off property and you're working on a trip for next year before November, book the housing first. That isn't a contradiction of the courses-first rule. The tee sheets aren't open yet, so there's nothing to book. Lock the house to hold your dates, then take the tee time the day the window opens.

What's known about the windows

The one I can give you flat is Arcadia Bluffs. Tee times for the coming season open around November 1 of the prior year. If a summer round there is the centerpiece of your trip, that's the date to have on your calendar.

Past that, windows vary by course, and I'm not going to publish a table that's wrong by next season. Properties change their systems, move their dates, and handle groups differently than singles. The way to find out is to call the pro shop in the fall and ask two questions. When does the book open for next season, and how do you handle a group of our size. You'll know more than every group that's guessing.

A rough month by month

This is about behavior, not dates. The exact timing shifts by course and by year.

Fall is when you decide. Nail down who's going, roughly when, and which fork you're on. This is also when you make the pro shop calls. Groups that use the fall well never feel rushed later.

Winter is when the sheets open. Most properties release the coming season somewhere in here, and it's when the group that decided in the fall does its booking. It's a strange time to be thinking about golf, which is exactly why it works.

By spring you're behind for peak weekends. You can still build a very good trip in the spring, and I do it all the time. What you've usually lost by then is the specific combination, a marquee course on a Saturday morning in July with eight beds walking distance from dinner. Shift one variable, the weekend or the course or the town, and it opens back up.

Summer means you take what's available. Booking inside the season is real, and dates outside the midsummer peak, in late spring and early fall, have more openings on the sheet. The tradeoff is that you're fitting the trip to the openings instead of the other way around.

Which month to come is a different question from how far ahead to reserve, and I keep them apart on purpose. Whether a month plays well, how the weather and conditions run, and where the value sits are all in the best time to play Northern Michigan golf guide. This page is about the booking clock and the order you move in. If you want the budget side before you commit to dates, what a Michigan golf trip costs has it.