Old Head Green Fees And How To Book: The 2027 Rates, The Season, And The Clifftop Suites

The 2027 Green Fees

Old Head prices in two bands. High season for 2027 runs from Wednesday 14 April to Sunday 10 October. Low season is the short window from Monday 11 October to Sunday 31 October. Outside those dates the course is closed.

Eighteen holes in high season is €550. Eighteen holes in low season is €275, exactly half. That is a substantial saving for a group willing to travel in the second half of October, and it is the single biggest lever on the cost of this round.

The club also publishes multi-round packs. An eighteen-hole pack is €170 in high season and €260 in low season, and a thirty-six-hole pack is €280 high and €400 low. Read those against the single-round rates carefully when you plan, and confirm the terms with reservations, because the way a pack applies to a visiting group rather than a member is the kind of detail that should come from the club rather than from us.

There is one more thing worth saying plainly: the club does not publish a shoulder-season rate between the April opening and the October low-season window. From 14 April, you are paying high season.

The Season: When You Can Actually Play

The 2027 season runs from 14 April to 31 October. The course is closed from 1 November 2026 through to 13 April 2027.

This matters more than it sounds, because it removes Old Head from a whole category of trip. A February golf week in the southwest, which is a real thing and a good-value one at Cork and Kinsale hotel rates, cannot include this round. Neither can an early-April arrival. If Old Head is the reason you are coming to Cork, the trip has to sit inside those dates.

Within the season, the practical advice is the one we give for every Irish coastal course. June gives you the longest evenings and the best odds on calm weather. Late September is the photographer's fortnight. The low-season October window halves the green fee and roughly doubles your chance of a genuinely difficult wind. All three are defensible. Just know which trade you are making.

The Extras, And What The Day Actually Costs

Old Head is designed as a walking course and the club asks members and guests to walk it with a caddie. The published caddie rates are €90 for a senior caddie carrying a single bag and €70 for a senior caddie on a double. A forecaddie is €80 for one player, €40 each for two, and €30 each for a group of three or four.

Those are the fees. The tip is separate and it is the part American visitors most often get wrong. Budget €70 to €100 per bag on top, in cash, in euro, handed over at the eighteenth. More if the caddie has walked you round in weather.

A golf cart is €65, though we would not take one on this course if you are physically able to walk it. Club rental is €65 and the club stocks Titleist, Callaway and TaylorMade. A push trolley is €10.

Put that together for a fourball in high season, walking with a senior caddie each and tipping properly, and you are at roughly €550 plus €90 plus €85 per player, which is a shade under €2,900 for the group before lunch. We would rather you saw that number written down here than discovered it at the counter.

How To Get A Tee Time

There is no public online tee sheet. Old Head handles reservations through an enquiry form on its own site and through direct contact, and the fastest route for a visiting group is email.

Golf and suite reservations go to reservations@oldhead.com. General enquiries go to info@oldhead.com. The telephone number is +353 21 477 8444. The club also runs a specific enquiry form with subject options for reservations, Heli-Golf and requesting a caddie, which is the cleanest way to ask for all three in one message.

What we would put in that email: your dates with at least three days of flexibility, the number of players, the number of caddies you want, whether you need club rental, and whether you are interested in a suite. Asking for everything at once saves a week of correspondence, and a group that arrives with its requirements already organised gets treated well.

One practical note on caddies. The club says caddies are requested rather than guaranteed. Ask for them in the booking email, confirm them a fortnight out, and do not assume that a party of four will automatically be met by four caddies on the morning.

Staying On The Headland

Old Head has clifftop suites, and they are a genuine option rather than an afterthought. The published high-season rates per night, for a maximum of two people with breakfast included, are €850 for a Seaview suite, €1,200 for the de Courcey and €1,500 for the O'Connor. Low-season rates for the same rooms are €500, €700 and €900. No children under twelve.

The club also publishes shorter golf-and-stay windows. An eighteen-hour Seaview stay is €250 in low season and a thirty-six-hour is €365. The Presidential equivalents are €450 and €525. Those are unusual products and the terms are worth confirming with suites@oldhead.com before you assume what they include.

Would we book them? For one night, yes, and specifically the night before an early tee time, because waking up on the promontory is an experience Kinsale cannot replicate. For three nights, no. The suites have no children under twelve, no village around them, and the club's dining is the only dining. Kinsale is a fifteen-minute drive away and it is the best eating town in Ireland. That is where the other two nights belong.

Our usual recommendation for the trip is Perryville House on the Kinsale harbour front: adults only, no restaurant, antiques and proper linen, five minutes' walk from three good dinners. It is a base rather than a resort, which in a town like Kinsale is exactly what you want.

Arriving By Helicopter, And Eating At The Club

Old Head maintains a helipad that can host up to four helicopters at a time, and markets a Heli-Golf service that moves groups between courses, hotels and airports. If you are building a compressed Ireland golf week where road transfers are eating your playing time, this is the course most set up to receive you by air. Enquiries go through the club's own form with Heli-Golf as the subject.

On the food: the clubhouse has the de Courcey Restaurant, the Lusitania Bar and a terrace, plus on-course catering at the turn and a food cart. The head chef is Rory McDonnell and the restaurant manager is Jackie Mutter. It is a good lunch and a convenient one. We would still eat dinner in Kinsale.

The locker rooms are oak-lined with spa showers, which is the kind of detail that tells you where the €550 goes. Facilities include a warm-up range, a putting green and a short-game practice area, and we would use all three, because arriving at the first tee cold on a course this dramatic is a waste of the first four holes.

Is It Worth €550?

We will give you our honest position rather than a hedge. If you have one round to play in Ireland, it should not be this one. Royal County Down, Portrush, Lahinch and Ballybunion are better golf courses, and two of them cost meaningfully less.

If you have a week and five or six rounds, Old Head earns a place in it, and it earns it as the day nobody in the group will stop talking about. The walk out along the cliff edge with the lighthouse ahead of you is not something the other courses can offer at any price. Treat it as the spectacle day, folded into a Kinsale overnight with a good dinner at the end of it, and the €550 makes sense in a way it never will as a standalone round squeezed between airports.

The version of this trip we would not book is the one where a group drives two hours from Killarney, pays €550 each, plays into a thirty-knot wind, and drives back. That is how people come away feeling they were charged for a view they could not see.

The Things That Catch Americans Out

Four practical points, each of which we have watched cost somebody money or a morning.

First, the currency. Old Head prices in euro. If your week also includes Royal County Down or Royal Portrush you are paying those in pounds sterling, and a group treasurer working from one spreadsheet in dollars will be out by a meaningful amount by the end of the trip. Set the budget in both currencies from the start and put the caddie cash in euro notes before you leave Cork Airport, because there is no reason to be looking for an ATM in a village on the morning of your round.

Second, the tee time window. The club takes reservations by enquiry rather than through a public tee sheet, which means there is no live availability screen for you to refresh. The practical consequence is that the answer depends on how early you ask and how flexible you are, and a group offering a single date in the second week of July is asking for the one thing the club has least of. Offer three dates. You will get one of them.

Third, the weather cancellation question. Ask it explicitly in writing when you book, because the policy for a clifftop course in open ocean is not the same as the policy at a parkland club, and you want the club's own answer in an email rather than our summary of it. This matters most for groups arriving on non-refundable transatlantic flights.

Fourth, the drive. The headland has one access road and it goes through the club's own gateway. Allow more time than the map suggests for the last few miles, particularly in July and August when the road into Kinsale carries holiday traffic. We would be in the car park forty-five minutes before the time, not twenty.

None of this is difficult. It is simply the difference between a round that felt worth €550 and one that felt like a transaction.