With inflation still gripping our collective wallets, a golf trip to a high-profile resort like Bandon Dunes, Pinehurst or Pebble Beach may not be in the financial cards for most this fall.
Sure, spending more than $300 a round is steep, but that doesn’t mean a budget conscious golf vacation can’t be accomplished in September or October.
Take a destination such as Gull Lake View Golf Club and Resort in southwest Michigan, which has been family owned for more than six decades and offers affordability without sacrificing quality or course conditions.
For starters, the resort, located between Chicago and Detroit in Augusta, Michigan, offers six golf courses with its most recent addition in 2017 — Stoatin Brae Golf Club— being named the 2021 National Golf Course of the Year by the National Golf Course Owners Association, along with the honor of the 2020 Michigan Golf Course of the Year by the Michigan Golf Course Association. That’s some heady stuff considering Michigan is one of the more competitive states when it comes to golf course selection, design and distinctive topography.
Current CEO Bill Johnson and the late co-owner of the resort, Jon Scott, came up with the idea of a sixth course like Stoatin Brae when they were on a golf trip to Bandon Dunes.
“Jon and I really wanted a destination golf course, something that was different,” Johnson says. “It really sits on a high point in Kalamazoo County, on a huge bluff and it is wide open. You can see holes all over the place when you’re standing at these high points because there are no trees. It feels like a true links golf course. It’s just very unique to Michigan. The key to its success was us bringing a different product other than what golfers were used to.”
Johnson recalls talking about getting in touch with famed architect Tom Doak for the new project while he and Scott were on the Oregon golf outing.
“We figured we would give Tom a call and see if he’d come look at the land,” Johnson says. “We didn’t think he’d even know who we were but he was here in a few days and he liked the land a lot.”
Due to a project conflict, Doak handed the Stoatin Brae job to his Renaissance Golf A-team of designers — Eric Iverson, Brian Schneider, Don Placek and Brian Slawnik. They were responsible for the layout and critical shaping, bringing Scottish influences while creating a minimalist classic links style.
And this time of the year, golfers get a special view while playing Stoatin Brae.
“Stoatin Brae’s restaurant sits on top of a vista and it’s kind of like you’re in the Smoky Mountains,” Johnson says. “You can see the smoke coming off the Kalamazoo River when it’s cool in the morning and you can see for miles. When you get that haze off the warm water with the cool mornings it makes you feel like you are in the clouds and you can reach up and touch them.”
With the addition of the award-winning Stoatin Brae as its sixth golf offering seven years ago, Gull Lake View has logged more than 125,000 rounds with a short golf season that runs April-early November, and is on pace to increase that number in 2024.
“We were pulling mainly from the Midwest, but our business has grown tremendously since the new course was built and that circle keeps getting a little bigger every year,” says Johnson, noting that golfers from Canada and Ohio are beginning to show up in greater numbers in addition to those from the aforementioned major U.S. cities.
And its awareness. Johnson says a large contingent from Texas golfed at the resort when the Longhorns played at the University of Michigan the first week of September.
Johnson says the resort seems to have found the proper balance between cost and quality to where golfers feel their money has been well spent.
“Our philosophy is we want everybody to be able to enjoy our properties,” he says. “Sure, Stoatin Brae is a little more expensive, but even for a course that is ranked in the top 10 in Michigan you can get on that golf course for under $100. And we try to keep our other five courses priced accordingly so we’ve got different price points for everybody. Yes, the golf industry is doing well right now, but if you tend to raise prices too much eventually you’re going to have to come down and that’s not something we want to do.”
And Johnson notes that Gull Lake View’s age requires additional and constant updating, of which $2 million per year since COVID-19 has been poured back into the infrastructure, from updating condos to golf course irrigation.
“The competition is always there. I think it is for any business,” Johnson says of golf resort choices nationwide. “But we just try to never forget who we are and what we do best. We believe people can’t enjoy the game once it gets to the point where everything’s getting too expensive.
“Most of our guests have been coming for 10, 20, 30 years, and they book the same condo the same weekend. You get to know people and people get to know you — it’s almost like their home away from home. They love the golf because it’s so friendly, and you can actually come here and score and have a good time and not get beat up by golf courses that are built for a player like Tiger Woods.”