Everyone loves a golf getaway. As the weather cools, thousands of Canadians start dreaming on warm-weather destinations for their next trip or look forward to heading to hotspots next year—places like Bandon, Cabot, Scotland, Ireland.

Experienced golf travelers will tell you the best way to enjoy your trip and get the most out of your golf is to plan ahead, ensuring you have all the things you’ll need once you hit the ground. There’s nothing more frustrating than landing in your destination and finding you’ve overlooked something when you get to a hotel, or even worse—the course.

Here’s some considerations when you’re getting ready for your next great golf escape!

Protect Your Clubs

Everyone has seen the golfer who shows up at the airport with their clubs unprotected by anything more than the rain cover obscuring their set. This confident golfer might get away with it, but let’s be honest—who wants their clubs broken, stolen, misplaced or worse?

That’s why it is essential you protect your investment in your clubs when you’re traveling. It all starts with finding the right golf travel bag. There’s a wide variety of golf travel bags on the market, often branded with the logo of your favourite clubmaker. Some fit tightly, while others are loose and offer a fair bit of extra space. Better models will often come with some guarantee of resilience and wheels that make them much easier to move through airports or into the back of a rental car. You can find hard shell models that will withstand a beating (but are admittedly harder to store if you’re traveling from place to place) and soft-shell cases that tuck away when they aren’t being used.

PING’s Rolling Travel Cover is one of the stronger options on the market, and comes with wheels, making it significantly easier to move around in those long walks in the airport.

And consider Shock Shield Cover Travel Guard or Club Glove Stiff Arm  which is designed to keep your clubs from being damaged if some baggage handler accidently drops it from a height.

We all know someone that’s happened to, and PGA and LPGA Tour pros use the Stiff Arm. If it is good enough for a person making their living playing the game, it is surely a good option for recreational players.

Veteran Tip

If you buy the right travel bag for your clubs, you’ll find you can get more than just golf clubs in the bag. Often travel bags have some extra space, allowing you to put your toiletries in (avoiding any issue with liquids in your carry on) and perhaps an extra pair of comfortable shoes for apres-golf. And golf travel bags are a great place for your used golf shirts and pants as your trip progresses.

And consider taking the head off your driver before you put it in the bag. It is the longest club you’ll own and most susceptible to being broken if your bag falls or gets dropped in transit.

Come Prepared

One of the keys to a great golf trip is making sure you’ve got the essentials with you prior to heading to the Caribbean, California, Ireland or other great golf hot spots. Now is a great time, especially as the season winds down, to check out your supplies. Did your golf gloves look like the dog was at them?

Then consider Titleist’s Men’s Players Golf Glove.

And you don’t want to have to overpay for things you’ll know you need—think the essentials like tees—so snap up the Pride Sports Combo Pack (giving you a variety of tee heights, making it perfect for irons into the one-shot holes, and teeing that driver high and letting it fly).

And everyone loses their divot tool at some point, so grab a Callaway Divot Tool and Ball Market combo, allowing you to keep the greens you play in great shape. And who has a coin these days in the era of digital payments?

Lastly, make sure you’ve got golf balls to make the trip a success. No one wants to overpay for golf balls in some exotic holiday spot, so get a dozen of TaylorMade’s TP5 balls (think Pix, or X, or whatever your flavour) and you’ll be prepared when one inadvertently hits a tree and finds its demise in a nearby pond.

And if you’ve played a lot this year, a new set of kicks is a great idea. FootJoys Hyperflex Spiked shoes, available in men’s and women’s, offer the right mix of support and new-look sporty aesthetics that will look great at your sunny destination and help you hit the shots you’re hoping for.