Town Rankings / Florida

The Best Golf Courses in Destin

Destin sells white sand and emerald water, and its golf lives in the shade of that pitch, spread through the pines and along the bayous between the beach and Choctawhatchee Bay. The town was a fishing village before it was a resort, and the courses here still feel like they were cut out of working Panhandle land: longleaf pine, wetlands, an old turpentine plantation. Four public and resort courses carry the local scene, and for once in Florida, every name on the list will sell a tee time to a stranger.

That changes the ranking's math. With access a wash, the scoring comes down to the golf itself and the quality of the day, and Destin's top three separate cleanly: a bayfront design with a famous name attached, a tournament tested resort course through the pines, and a solid community course that locals defend. The fourth is the value play, and it knows it.

1Kelly Plantation Golf Club

Kelly Plantation was a turpentine plantation before it was a golf course, which means the land had a working life before the resort era, and the Fred Couples and Gene Bates design from 1998 plays the bayfront ground it inherited rather than a manufactured version of it. The course runs along Choctawhatchee Bay, and the holes that meet the water are the best in Destin: exposed, scenic, and demanding in the wind, with the bay doing the work that Florida designers usually assign to bulldozers and ponds. Couples's name draws the visitors; Bates's routing keeps them honest.

The concession is the premium. Kelly Plantation prices itself as Destin's best and is played heavily by the vacation market, so peak season rounds are neither cheap nor quick. It also shares the Panhandle's flat canvas, elevated here by the bay rather than transformed. None of that displaces it. The strongest setting in town married to the strongest design gets No. 1, and Kelly Plantation has both by a margin the rest of the list can see.

2Sandestin Raven Golf Club

The Raven, Robert Trent Jones Jr. in 2000, is the tournament course of the group: it hosted the Champions Tour's Boeing Championship in the 2000s, and it is carved through pine forest and wetlands inside the Sandestin resort, one of four courses on that property. Jones Jr. works this kind of ground as well as anyone, threading holes through the trees and marsh with enough width to keep resort golfers in play and enough angle to interest better ones. Of the four Destin courses, the Raven is the one that feels like a test you could lose strokes to all day.

It finishes second on setting. Resort golf inside a big development, however well designed, plays a home game every day, and the Raven's surroundings are Sandestin's rather than the bay's. Conditioning and infrastructure are the best in the area, the tournament record is real, and golfers who value the test over the view will flip this ranking without apologizing. We score the golf first, and the golf is close. The day, in Destin, belongs to the water, and Kelly Plantation has it.

3Regatta Bay Golf and Yacht Club

Regatta Bay, a Robert C. Walker design from 1995, is Destin's community course in the best sense: semi-public, set in its own neighborhood on the bay side, and played by a local membership that treats it as home turf. Walker gave it a friendly, playable layout that still finds water and wetlands often enough to keep the scorecard interesting, and the whole operation runs at a lower temperature than the resort courses. For a golfer actually living in Destin, this is the name that comes up first, and local loyalty like that is earned over decades, not bought.

It gives up ground to the top two on design distinction. There is no signature stretch here that a visitor retells at dinner, and the tournament resume is empty. What Regatta Bay offers instead is the most relaxed good round in town, third on quality and first on an ordinary Tuesday.

4Indian Bayou Golf and Country Club

Indian Bayou is Destin's elder and its value play: an Earl Stone design from 1978, 27 holes across the Seminole, Choctaw, and Creek nines, public and priced for the local market it has served since before the condo towers. Stone built plainspoken Gulf Coast golf, and Indian Bayou is that tradition intact: flat, tree lined, walkable in spirit, and utterly without pretense.

Fourth place here is about ceiling, not worth. The design is the simplest on the list and the conditioning runs to its price point. But 27 holes of affordable golf five minutes from the beach is infrastructure a resort town needs, and Indian Bayou has quietly provided it for nearly fifty years while flashier neighbors came and went.

The charter boats come in past the harbor at dusk and the courses empty into the pine shade, and Destin goes back to being a fishing town that happens to have good golf. Kelly Plantation in the morning, when the bay is flat and the wind is still deciding, is the round to build the trip around.