Golf Guide
Four things to check before you book
Not a blog. Four questions every society organiser has to answer before the deposits go in.
Piece one
The day you don’t play
Five nights and four rounds leaves one day spare. What you do with it decides whether the non-golfers come back next year.
Belek sits on at least twelve kilometres of coast, with a Greco-Roman city, a canyon, four waterfalls and a cave within an hour’s drive. None of it needs a tour operator and none of it takes a full day. Our shortlist:
of Antalya
Perge
A Pamphylian city with roots to around 1000 BC: stadium, theatre, agora and the Temple of Artemis Pergaia. Allow half a morning. The walking is flat, and it suits a group that includes people who did not come for the golf.
Side and the Temple of Apollo
A 7th-century BC harbour town with the Temple of Apollo, close enough to Belek to combine with lunch instead of making a full day of it.
long
Köprülü Canyon
Fourteen kilometres of gorge inside a national park, with walls reaching four hundred metres. Rafting runs from here. This is the one that fills a whole day, and the one to schedule the day after the last round, not the day before.
Zeytintaşı Cave
Close and indoors, which makes it the wet-weather answer in March, the wettest month of the golf season at ten rain days. The full month-by-month table is on the Belek page.
brands
Land of Legends Shopping Avenue
It exists, it is large, and on a mixed trip it will fill an afternoon that would otherwise become a problem.
The four waterfalls, by distance
Düden 28 km · Kurşunlu 30 km · Manavgat 47 km · Uçansu 60 km. Two of the four are inside forty minutes of the hotels, which is the difference between an afternoon out and a lost day.
How to place the rest day
Put it in the middle, not at the end. A group that plays four days straight and sightsees on the fifth arrives at the airport tired; a group that breaks on day three plays the back half better and argues less.
Piece two
How many golf courses does Belek have?
This looks like a question with an answer. It is not, and the disagreement starts inside Belek’s own tourism association.
Ten clubs. Around 270 holes.
Ask how many golf courses Belek has and you will hear 15, 16 and “more than 20”, sometimes from the same organisation.
The reason is that a “course” is not a fixed unit. Cullinan Links has two separate eighteens that play nothing like each other: two courses by any useful measure. Cornelia has twenty-seven holes sold as three named combinations, King, Queen and Prince. One course or three? Count one way and Belek has sixteen; count the other and it has more. Both counts are fair, and neither compares with the other.
Holes are the unit that holds. Ten clubs in Belek, counted by the hole, come to 270.
| Club | Named courses | Holes | From AYT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Antalya Golf Club | The PGA Sultan · The Pasha | 36 | 25 km |
| National Golf Club | Irmak · Tuna | 18 | 25 km |
| Cullinan Links | Aspendos · Olympos | 36 | 26 km |
| Kaya Palazzo | Championship | 18 | 27 km |
| Carya Golf Club | Championship · floodlit | 18 | 28 km |
| Sueno Golf Club | Pines · Dunes | 36 | 30 km |
| Cornelia Golf Club | King · Queen · Prince | 27 | 35 km |
| Montgomerie Maxx Royal | Championship | 18 | 35 km |
| Gloria Golf Club | Old · New · Verde | 45 | 40 km |
| Robinson Nobilis | Championship | 18 | 40 km |
Lykia Links is left out: it is at Manavgat, not Belek.
Floodlit golf
Carya is floodlit on all eighteen holes and National on the last four. We add an evening round to a quote only once the club has confirmed the dates, times and price.
Piece three
What “ultra all inclusive” leaves out
Belek sells ultra all inclusive as though it settles the question of money. It does not. Below are the extras at one Belek property, every one of them outside the board.
À la carte restaurants
Charged, plus a table setting fee
À la carte last orders
20:30, earlier than most UK groups expect
Room service
Charged, except in villas
Late checkout / early check-in
Charged
Bottled spirits, premium brands, sommelier wines
Charged
Doctor, babysitting, sports lessons, tennis and paddle kit
Charged
Pool and beach cabanas, gazebos
Charged
Floating Disco
Over-18s, charged, booking required
None of this is a complaint; it is a normal ultra all-inclusive board. The problem is that an organiser budgeting for twenty-four people sees the phrase, not the list.
Two of these catch groups out. The first is the 20:30 last order in the à la carte restaurants: a society that finishes eighteen holes at six, showers, and drifts down at nine has missed the kitchen, and a prize-giving does not survive being moved to the buffet. Book the room, not the table. The second is bottled spirits: the bar round a group assumes is covered is the one that is not.
How to use this
Ask for the full list of extras before you sign. Every Belek property has one, the exclusions differ from hotel to hotel, and on a group of twenty-four the differences are real money.
Why we do not name the hotel
Because the list is typical, not unusual. Naming one property would suggest the others are cleaner, and that is not the case.
Piece four
The handicap limit nobody checks until the first tee
Every Belek club sets a maximum handicap. The limits differ: the gap between the loosest and the tightest is twelve shots for men and sixteen for women, and it is rarely mentioned when a package is quoted. We hold the limit for ten Belek courses across nine clubs, and at Antalya Golf Club the two courses have different limits. For a society with a spread of abilities this decides where you can play, and it costs nothing to check before you take deposits.
| Club | Men | Women | As the club words it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cullinan Links | 36 | 44 | A flat limit, and the most generous in Belek. |
| Gloria | 36 | 40 | Same limit on all three of its courses. |
| Carya | 36 | 36 | A flat limit. |
| National | 36 | 36 | Same limit as its sister course. Soft spikes are the harder rule here. |
| Sueno | 36 | 36 | “The facility can reduce it to 28 during peak periods.” |
| PGA Sultan | 24 | 28 | The tightest in Belek, for men and for women. |
| The Pasha | 28 | 36 | Same club, four shots looser. |
| Kaya Palazzo | 28 | 36 | A flat limit. Tightest of all but the Sultan. |
| Montgomerie Maxx Royal | 28 | 36 | Set by the club. |
| Nobilis · Robinson | 28 | 36 | We confirm this limit with the club before booking. |
Twenty-eight is not an unusual handicap in a UK society. Twenty-four is. A club running a limit twelve shots tighter than the club two miles down the road is not being difficult; it is protecting pace of play on a course where the trouble is water. But it means the same group can be welcome at one Belek club and turned away at another, and at Antalya Golf Club welcome on one course and turned away on the other.
The Sueno line is the one to watch, because it is conditional. A limit of 36 that the club may cut to 28 in a busy week is a different thing from a limit of 36, and the difference lands on whichever of your members is off 32.
How to use this
Collect your members’ current handicaps before you take deposits, not after. Then ask us to confirm the limit with the club for your dates. It takes one email and it is the most avoidable way to spoil a trip.
Why only four clubs
Because these are the four clubs whose limits we have from the club itself. We do not show a limit a club has not given us; a wrong number here costs somebody their round.
Each figure is the club’s maximum accepted handicap. Where a club words it differently, we use its wording.
Ask us something specific
Ask us before you book.
Handicap limits, buggy policy, what the board covers, which week suits your group. Ask us one question and we will answer it, whether or not you book with us.
Ask one question