Welcome aboard the most exclusive trip in golf

Passengers at their lowest go viral when they get air rage. I’ve only ever experienced ground rage, a milder cousin. Whenever a flight delay is announced, hot spasms shoot from the pit of my stomach to my suddenly grinding teeth as my neck tenses, the anxious energy disbursing in two terminals of sweat above my ears. A pushback of just 20 unexplained minutes is enough to stoke oh-so-many bad memories, all formed in a life of perhaps no worse than average luck getting periodically trapped inside the house of cards that is our commercial air system.

I was recently having an attack—a $5 orange from Hudson News combined with headlines about air traffic controllers striking against the U.S. government shutdown gave the spasm an acidic, fruit-forward note in my esophagus—during an attempt to leave my home regional airport in the fall of 2025. Staring at the familiar dingy blue carpet and overflowing trash of good old gate B6, I concentrated on taking deep breaths and letting go of my fresh and irrational hatred toward just about everything. If my person and golf clubs could survive the gauntlet of three connections to Sydney, an astonishing reward awaited that would surely correct my generosity of spirit.

Kalos Golf, a travel company based in Chapel Hill, N.C., had invited me to join a trip called “Golf Around the World” being run in partnership with luxury tour operator TCS World Travel. Aboard a chartered Airbus A321, which normally has a capacity of 220 passengers but this one refitted with 52 full laydown seats, our group would travel to play golf twice in Australia, Singapore, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, and three times in Spain, in that order, as we worked our way back to the U.S. following the convenient clip of time zones and the turning of the Earth.

“Always travel east to west, and always eat yogurt first thing at breakfast,” says Jim Lamont, the trim, affable 9-handicap with a military background who founded Kalos Golf in 1997. Whenever Lamont is early for a commercial flight in an empty airport, he’ll walk the wrong direction on moving walkways for exercise. He’s forever grateful to the ghosts of British imperialists, despite their wicked ways, for dotting the globe with golf courses and churches, thus laying the foundation for the business he and his wife, Karen, have grown to 26 employees plus contractors. “You’ll be eating so many new and different foods, and yogurt coats the stomach.”

Another useful quote, attributable to the legendary journalist Tina Brown, about the new seduction of flying private is, “You realize there is no one you wouldn’t kill, betray or sleep with to ensure a lifetime of luxe relief from the armpit of mass transit.”

Beyond the sumptuousness of our non-public vessel and great golf, across 18 days there would also be tours of opera houses and museums, wine tastings, cooking and dance classes, cruises by yacht and helicopter, small gifts and nothing but five-star hotels and meals. Joining our crew of porters and organizers would be a doctor to provide medical treatments as needed and a university professor to provide social history lectures as wanted.

Though the price tags are eye-watering, curated group travel by jet is a category that has thrived post-pandemic. The Four Seasons charters planes for multi-destination trips where customers stay in its hotels and partake in edifying excursions, though no golf. Of the 26 trips Kalos Golf operated last year, only two were exclusively by private jet; the rest utilized boats, trains, vans, commercial air, maybe a chartered flight for certain legs here and there. Itineraries and prices vary accordingly, and as with any market there are competitors. Perry Golf, as one example, organizes tours that tend to be more golf-intensive for smaller groups. Much of the legwork is in establishing relationships with foreign private courses. Customers book these trips 15-18 months in advance, and tour operators can predict demand like clockwork against the stock market.

“Not that our clients are that meaningfully affected by the ebbs and flows of the market, but booking trips like ours is a matter of psychology and confidence,” says Casey Oliver, chief of marketing for Kalos Golf, which served 1,500 unique customers last year, all from the U.S. The “non-media rate” price for Golf Around the World was $156,000 per person. Before you rip your magazine in half or hurl your electronic reading device against the wall in a fit of jealous rage directed at me or a universe that allows such wealth disparity, know that I, your humble writer, go forth only to bear witness.

How does such a trip look and feel? Who goes? What would it be like to watch the cost of a second-tier college education get spent in less than three weeks? Luckily, the flight delay that began my journey proved negligible. After a disgusting sandwich in Philly and a brisk jog through LAX, I was safely aboard a big commercial bird and just 15 miserable hours over the Pacific from answers.

The open-air welcome dinner at the Park Hyatt hotel overlooking Sydney Harbour revealed, predictably, a room of mostly retired white couples, although there were two younger female golf buddies from a club in St. Louis and one patriarch oilman from Calgary who’d brought not only his wife but also their two daughters and their husbands. He’d surprised them all on a tearful Christmas morning. “You can’t take it with you, so why not enjoy it with the people you love while you still can,” he said to our table. It would be a few days later, at the Singapore Marina Bay Sands casino, that three of us helped this gent out of an elevator after at least that many martinis on the 57th-floor rooftop bar. The total lack of judgment from his children, rather respect, for their elder sowing his oats so far from home and hearth, was touching.

“We had some friends die, so we figured let’s do this while we can walk,” said a woman from Atlanta, which was most shocking coming from her, as she and her husband were country club tennis fit.

From the cigar-chomping Texan who’d just sold his electric-parts company emanated no such morbidity. He seemed to be dedicating the rest of his days to speaking only in jokes, and at several of the golf courses we visited inquired about the course record as if on my behalf. “I couldn’t even spell A.I. back in 2019, but, man, those data centers sure need a lot of transistors!” This was Tex and his wife’s second Kalos Golf trip, and they were booked for six more. It was the exploration of world cultures long coming to her; he’d already visited both Singapore and Dubai multiple times on single-night business trips to see manufacturers. “Those people just love to meet in person!” He could laugh about it now.

If half the crowd were repeat customers excited to kick off another decadent journey of the very best life has to offer, in the comparative dining quietude of the other half lurked the question, Will this really be worth it? During dessert, the wry announcement from expedition leader Jill Peacock that THC/CBD products could not be brought on “the jet” fetched some titters. I liked Jill. Highly organized yet laid back, she had traveled the world as a penniless backpacker until she aged out of the hostel scene. Ironically, this hardscrabble sense for navigating less-beaten paths now informed how she arranged travel for one-percenters. Once everybody started mingling on the golf course, she assured me, strong bonds among the group would form.

Besides golf, the other commonality was these were people who’d made their money. The Chicago lawyer who started his own accounting firm while putting himself through night school and building a real estate empire asked a version of the same rhetorical question aloud almost daily: “What am I going to do, leave even more money to my kids?” He’d grown up without a father.

One vicarious trope of “Succession,” the TV show about a media mogul’s ethically challenged offspring and feuding corporate hangers-on, is a fleet of black Mercedes vans always appearing on cue to ensure the smoothest of transitions. Well, take it from me, it takes only a few days to get benumbed. Always expect a cold face towelette, never board a van that’s more than half full, and know that the attendant (there to offer local color, bottled water and act as intermediary with the driver) will politely stay quiet upon request. “Do you want peaceful or high energy?” is how you might hear their service described when English is a second or fifth language. Never tip because everything has already been taken care of. If you venture outside the hotel for dinner, yet another guide will wait in the shadows with the sole duty of paying the check.

A word about hotel check-ins: No need. Part of the deal with paying this kind of money is that you never wait for anything, ever. After being served your greeting mocktail at the reception lobby, simply follow your personal concierge who has the key to your room. You will always find a gift on your pillow, robe and slippers, a top-shelf espresso machine and a basket of local fruits with a silverware setting. Your luggage will be brought up shortly, and your golf clubs are in transit to whichever course you’re playing tomorrow.

If it’s the Australian Club, know that gentlemen aren’t to wear socks that reveal the ankles. After a nice, dry Riesling and luncheon, you’ll find your clubs on a cart by the range. One of the promises on these trips is that you never lift your golf bag. Some members with trundlers (Aussie for “pushcart”) might shoot you sideways looks, but a good thing to be in life is un-embarrassable. Lest you ever need a reminder, glance down at your tour-issued nametag. So what if we’re all riding at a walking course? Kalos Golf has found its American clientele mostly prefers to ride and at certain courses in Italy will even truck in carts in advance.

My golf buddies couldn’t believe I was flying all the way to Australia and not going to Melbourne, home of the famous sand-belt courses. Kalos offers itineraries that include Melbourne, but it’s important to understand golf is not the sole driver on these trips geared toward couples. When half-days or offdays are spent on history tours or classes, the dinner conversations rarely come around to putting. As a golf sicko who has only ever crammed in as many rounds as possible while traveling, I must admit, dialing it back is a good way to go. For instance, the last place I would ever visit on a golf trip is a zoo, which I associate with suicidal animals, melted ice cream and tantrums. But after a VIP tour of Taronga Zoo with “special koala access” in the company of my new high-net-worth pals, any tee shot I sailed thereafter into the uniquely evolved flora and fauna of the island-continent felt enriched. As the zookeeper remarked about koala claws and wallaby kicks, “People go on about our snakes and lizards, but it’s our furry friends you need to worry about.”

New South Wales Golf Club, No. 23 in the Golf Digest World’s 100 Greatest, is no small consolation for not playing No. 5 Royal Melbourne West. Situated with three other courses on Little Bay Peninsula, the lot was once nearly combined and developed into the antipodal answer to Pebble Beach Resort in the 1980s. But private NSW, true to its logo of a cypress tree bent sideways from wind, held fast against going corporate. We happened to catch it on a calm day, but thanks to my conversation the day prior with David Keeling (distinguished professor of cultural geography emeritus, Western Kentucky University), I could gaze into the Pacific and consider Captain Perouse, the French explorer whose ships went down without a trace in a cyclone in 1788. Had Perouse made it home, it’s possible the French would’ve claimed Little Bay and beyond, initiating unknowable wrinkles in centuries of geopolitics, and, oh, what very different fare we’d later be enjoying in the clubhouse for our second lunch.

No one can buy a game, and after golf our cohort generally looked just as sun-whipped and hangdog as the low-net strivers at any muny. To wash away the double bogeys, we celebrated our last evening in Australia aboard a yacht cruise with cocktails and canapes. Dinner was in a private hall at the Sydney Opera House, a single long table set as if for visiting political dignitaries, under the serenade of a quintet of classical musicians. I lost count of how many waiters, bartenders, guides, drivers, captains, first mates and dock workers assisted in the flow of the evening, but our group of about three dozen cut through the crowded harbor with tactical precision. Humiliating as it can feel to be conveyed through cities by guides like a child, the benefit to doing it in style is that all the other would-be tourist hunters of a city leave you well alone.

The wink-wink tail number of our jet was G-AXTW. Leased by TCS and operated by Titan Airways, the idea is to keep it in near continuous use all year to get to profit, especially after the refurbishment of the interior. When it comes to chairs, Italian leather meets air-grade specifications ain’t cheap. Yet at every destination, our plane sat unused at the airport for three or four days while the pilots, crew and chef hung out and collected their wages. The conveniences of a dedicated aircraft range from small (passengers can leave items onboard rather than perpetually pack up) to large (in the event of the unforeseen, like dangerous political unrest, a group can just get up and go). According to Travelopia chief operating officer Matt Hill, a tall 8-handicap from London with terrific width at the top of his backswing, the company always books, as a precaution, alternate destination hotels for tours that visit the Middle East. Pretty quickly, one sees how business practices that erode the bottom line support a greater philosophy of flexibility when serving the very wealthy. Wherever you go, there is always much more staff, space and food than necessary. If you reserve a tour to drive dune buggies but decide at the last second to bag it in favor of hanging by the hotel pool, you’re never met with even a hint of an eyeroll. As Lamont says, “I’m not a nickel and dime guy. You’ll never catch us serving prosecco instead of champagne.”

As sharp a pencil you might endeavor to keep against the luxuries delivered (18 times $2,000ish per-night hotel rooms, 11 times unaccompanied green fees, Michelin-star meals at nearly every seating, roughly a dozen private ground transfers at each destination, caddie fees, booze, activities, guides, however you amortize 35 hours of transcontinental private jetting when plain domestic goes for about $8,000 per hour), time is the hardest to value. At Phuket International customs, picture a line of a thousand travelers coiled upon itself like a cobra. Now picture smiling attendants in suits holding Kalos Golf placards directing you to a different line that isn’t really a line at all but rather an empty lobby staffed by officials more concerned about offering tea or chocolate than checking your passport. Just keep walking and don’t make eye contact with the poor bastards to your left.

Another van, another face towelette. This is when Lamont says, “There’s only two things you need to think about on our trips: red or white with dinner, and who do I want to play golf with tomorrow?”

I was chawing with the retired physician from Kansas City on our way to an elephant sanctuary outside Phuket (to which TCS makes a handsome annual donation) when our van halted on a cobblestone urban street. Flash-flooding had made the road impassable, so we took a detour through an alleyway so narrow that the massage workers on cigarette break had to stand up. Arm draped over his wife’s shoulder, the physician looked out the window and smiled. “So many of these places would’ve been too intimidating to arrange travel to on our own, but I haven’t been nervous or stressed once.”

Like good golfers, good travelers are flexible when things go wrong. While the broader challenge of Golf Around the World could be described as shepherding a horde of affluent senior citizens with the highest expectations to five destinations with rugged time-zone changes and heading off any possible reason for complaint before it happens (one seasoned Kalos staffer used to manage a current major pop star's tour operations, and it shows) the most successful travelers on this voyage were those who embraced its vagaries.

Like, say, caddie services in foreign countries.

Thailand’s Red Mountain Golf Club carves through the thick forests of a former tin mine and dialogue from the uniformed female caddies consists of two words: “Jungle” and “Maybe!” Blue Canyon Country Club, also a former tin mine as well as site of a Tiger Woods victory, staffed two female caddies per golfer, one to drive the cart and another to hold an umbrella against the sun as you walk to your ball.

“It was so weird. I’m like, why the heck am I riding around in this cart with this person I can’t talk to while my wife is ahead in another cart?” complained one of our party. The Texan called it the best caddie experience of his career.

At dinner that evening at the Rosewood—a spread of tom yum soup, crab, shrimp and curries served at literally the same outdoor location where the dinner scenes of the third season of “The White Lotus” were filmed—Professor Keeling mentioned how the geisha tradition, decorative and largely non-sexual, had passed down through centuries to arrive in present-day forms in golf and business. In the latter, a usual and concluding duty of young, attractive women is to put drunken businessmen safely into taxis home at the end of a big night.

My caddie at Sentosa Golf Club in Singapore, Abu, and I got along so well that he stayed with me for both rounds. The resort has hosted PGA and LPGA Tour events and straddles an amusement park in a way that reminds of Disney World. Abu had been caddieing for 50 years and drank his coffee through a straw from a plastic sandwich bag he tied to our golf cart. When Abu explained why this pouch method was superior to a cup in the great humidity, I couldn’t follow. To read putts, Abu, cigarette forever pursed between his lips, would squint into the sun and then slowly swoop his hand in a gesture of curvature. We got into a nice rhythm where he would mark my ball with his coin, which I would then remark with my coin to align the side-stamp, chase him a few steps to return his coin, then settle back over my putt. Abu and I talked at length about his father’s experiences in the British militia until I realized he was saying “Malaysia.”As much as you might love to hear your gentle narrator go shot by shot, let’s just say golf in Dubai is a lot like flat desert golf anywhere, and the most popular wildlife is the crane—a construction crane. Giant steel arms dominate the skyline, busily erecting a sprawling city of mostly vacant high-rises for a future that hasn’t arrived. On an eight-lane highway, one afternoon we passed a bus crammed with immigrant laborers in dusty blue uniforms sleeping against each other. The political leanings of our group were made crystal clear by those who bought logo shirts at the Trump International Dubai pro shop versus those who elected to tour the old town instead. The Persian Gulf is called The Arabian Gulf, depending on who you ask, and I went swimming in it. The beach club at the Four Seasons Jumeirah is achingly beautiful but for the bulldozers pushing sand to build another artificial beach and hotel directly in front of it.

Every society is shaped by a different set of challenges initially posed by its land, which ultimately determines how people, goods and ideas move across it over time—to paraphrase Professor Keeling. Before our final round at Valderrama, Keeling noted we were now at the cradle of civilization. The 1997 Ryder Cup host site is less than 20 miles from the Rock of Gibraltar and the north coast of Africa, where the colder Atlantic plunges underneath the saltier, warmer Mediterranean. For ancient Greek and Phoenician sailors, this was the end of the world. To this day, it’s a critical chokepoint of global shipping that the British won’t let the Spanish have back.

Keeling calls cruise lecturing “a pretty good retirement gig” and is accustomed to being the most sought dining companion on trips. Over a lovely paella and tempranillo, I admitted to him, bashfully, that I had chosen to play Finca Cortesin over visiting the Pablo Picasso museum. Keeling kindly reassured a desire to play the great courses of the world didn’t make one a Philistine. However, in the end it was Dr. Ryan Zahalka who became the hero of the trip. Zahalka, just 32, has ministered a diverse array of medical field support in his career, such as Space X astronauts and marathon runners in Antarctica, but this was his first golf mission. The good doctor came up big at La Reserva Club Sotogrande.

A self-made man from Washington (“I didn’t know what a stock was when I started in the mailroom at Goldman Sachs”) was having trouble breathing after our round. The hospital in Malaga was understaffed, and if not for Zahalka’s insistent but respectful intervention, it’s almost certain the popped lung wouldn’t have been correctly diagnosed. The man and his wife had to stay extra days for the pressure in his lung to stabilize, so they didn’t join the final leg home, but he was alive and cheerful at the last breakfast.

Over the Atlantic, an hour shy of Miami and completing our circumnavigation of the Earth, the captain came out to lead a champagne toast with the crew. I can’t remember exactly what was said, but the words were well-chosen and prompted folks to get out of their seats and stroll the aisle wishing farewells. Many promises were made to stay in touch.

“Next time, we’re bringing our kids,” said the financial advisor from Long Island to a couple who pledged to do the same.

Was it worth it?

Eighteen days of travel above my station revealed the final math as obvious—if you’re concerned at all about cost, this trip is not for you.

What has stayed with me was an observation from Jill Peacock. She had said it only to me on the yacht back in Sydney Harbour, when the sunset was kissing all our faces, and no one was concerned about what came next.

“In this life you want to travel either very high or very low,” said Jill. “It’s the middle that’s no good.”

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