How To Book Portmarnock: The Visitor Sheet, The Caddie, And The Dublin Room

Portmarnock Is A Members Club That Likes Visitors

The first fact worth internalising is that Portmarnock is not a resort. It is a members club founded in 1894 on a peninsula fifteen minutes north of Dublin, and its board runs the visitor calendar to protect the members' weekend rota, not to fill the tee sheet. That means visitor tee times are almost always Monday through Thursday, and almost always in the mid-morning to early-afternoon window. If your group wants a Saturday round, you should be reading our Royal County Down or Ballybunion collection instead. Those clubs run larger visitor programmes across the weekend.

The second fact is that the club treats visitors seriously. The starter will know your name. The caddie master will hand you a caddie who has been briefed on your handicap. The clubhouse staff will assume you know how to sit at the bar without being spoken to. If that atmosphere is what you have travelled for, Portmarnock is the round of the trip. If your party would rather be met with a resort-style welcome, we would send you to Trump Doonbeg or Adare Manor, and we would say so honestly.

The Visitor Window, And When To Send The Email

The visitor tee sheet at Portmarnock opens on a rolling basis roughly six months in advance, but the practical booking window for an American group is longer than that. We recommend you contact the visitor office nine to twelve months out with a request for a specific week, and let the office come back to you with the mornings they can offer inside that week. That request needs to include your full group size, the names of every player, the handicap of each, and a preferred and alternative date. Do not send a single date and ask for it back. The office reads that as a group that has not thought about the trip.

The office replies within a week or two with a tee time and a deposit invoice. The deposit is a fraction of the full green fee, invoiced in euro, and it is due within a fixed window that the reply will state. Pay the deposit the same day you receive it. Groups that let the deposit slide by a week are the groups who watch their tee time re-offered to a group that will not. We have watched this happen twice. Both times to Americans.

The Green Fee, The Caddie, And What To Pay In Cash

The published Portmarnock visitor green fee is in the top tier of Irish golf, and rightly so. Check the current fee on the club's visitor page before you build your budget. It moves each season. The fee covers the round only. The caddie is booked separately, invoiced separately, and paid separately, and if you do not book a caddie you will play the wrong course. We would not attempt this round without one.

The caddie fee is paid in cash at the end of the round, on top of a tip. We recommend you plan for the caddie fee plus a tip of roughly a quarter to a third of the fee for a caddie who has worked the round properly, and a full third or more if he has salvaged a scorecard. Bring the cash in euro. The clubhouse will not front you the notes, and there is no cash machine on the peninsula. Our tipping guide for Irish caddies covers the maths in more detail. Read it on the plane.

The Tee Choice, And The Honesty Of The Course

Portmarnock offers multiple tees, and the visitor default is a set that is longer than most American groups want on a first play. If your group's handicap index is above ten, we would recommend you play the whites rather than the blues, and if any of your party is above sixteen, we would move again. The course does not need extra yardage to defend itself. The wind will do that for you. We have watched too many groups play the back tees on a first visit and finish the round with no memory of the third or the fourteenth because they were busy hitting three woods into greens designed for wedges.

The other decision to make in advance is whether your group takes buggies. Portmarnock permits buggies for visitors on medical grounds only, subject to a doctor's note submitted with the booking. If your group needs buggies, submit the note with the initial visitor request. If the answer comes back no, you will walk. This is the course as it was designed, and we would tell you it is worth the four hours on foot.

One quiet decision worth making at the same time is which of your group carries the scorecard and which of your group carries the yardage book. We would ask you to split the two, because the player carrying both spends the round with their head in paper rather than in the wind, and the wind is the whole point of the peninsula. Give the yardage book to your caddie for the front nine and take it back at the turn if you want it. Let the round breathe. The card can wait until the green.

The Dublin Room Is The Other Half Of The Booking

You cannot book Portmarnock properly without booking the Dublin room in the same week. The two reservations are one plan. We put our guests at the Shelbourne on St Stephen's Green or the Merrion two streets away, and the room booking should be placed within a day of the tee time being confirmed. The reason is not availability. It is that the round-night dinner reservation, which is the anchor of the trip, needs to be placed the same week as the room, and neither of those two hotels will let you hold a table under your reservation until you are a confirmed guest.

Once the room is confirmed, ask the concierge to hold a table at Chapter One, Bastible, or Etto for the night of the round. All three of those rooms will hold a table for a resident of either hotel with more warning and less negotiation than they will for a walk-in booker. Our where to eat around Portmarnock essay covers which of the three to book for which sort of evening.

What The Concierge Can, And Cannot, Do For You

The Shelbourne and the Merrion concierges will hold the Chapter One table, the Bastible table, the Etto table, the Toner's booth if there is a group of six or more, and a car to the peninsula at seven in the morning. That is the useful list. What the concierge cannot do is book the Portmarnock tee time on your behalf. The club does not accept third-party visitor bookings, and any concierge who tells you otherwise is planning to use a broker who will add a service fee and a delay. Do not do this. Book the tee time yourself through the club's own visitor page, and use the concierge for everything downstream.

The other request worth placing with your concierge is a printed copy of the Portmarnock scorecard delivered to your room the night before the round, so you can walk the course on paper over a glass of wine after dinner. This is a small thing, and it changes how the round reads on the morning. Every good Dublin concierge we work with knows the request. It costs nothing, and it saves you fifteen minutes on the first tee that you would otherwise spend orienting yourself.

The Month We Would Book, And Why

The month we would book Portmarnock in, for a group of American golfers, is late May or early June. The wind is settled, the course is dry, the sun is up until nearly ten in the evening, and the peninsula is at its most photogenic. September is our second choice, for the same reasons on a different swing of the year. We would avoid July and August, because the visitor sheet fills with corporate groups and the Dublin hotels raise their rates for the tourist peak. We would avoid January through March, because the peninsula reads flat under grey light and the wind arrives without shape.

The other seasonal note worth taking is that late June carries a specific risk we would flag for any American group. The Irish Open and the various pro-am events that circle it lock out visitor tee sheets across the east coast in a way the club will not warn you about in advance. If your dates fall inside the two weeks either side of the Irish Open, ask the visitor office explicitly whether your window overlaps a members' event or a corporate day. The office will tell you the truth if you ask. It will not volunteer the answer.

If you can only travel in the peak months, book earlier. Twelve months out, not six. Take the mid-week morning the office offers you first, and do not push for the Friday. The Friday visitor slots at Portmarnock are the hardest to secure, because they read as a bridge between the members' rota and the weekend, and the club protects them. Take the Tuesday or the Wednesday morning, sleep at the Shelbourne, and let the round be what it is. That is the trip. Book it in that order, and it will hold together on the day.