Town Rankings / Hawaii
The Best Golf Courses in Kihei
Kihei is south Maui's working beach town, condos and strip malls and six miles of sand, and its golf sits one neighborhood south in Wailea, where the lawns get watered and the green fees double. The arrangement suits everybody. You sleep in Kihei at half the price, drive five minutes, and play resort golf on a coast that stays dry and sunny while rain works the rest of the island.
Three Wailea courses stack above the shore here, plus the one course that is actually in Kihei itself. We score the golf first, then the day, then what it costs you, and that order produces one demotion the Wailea regulars will argue about at the bar.
1Wailea Golf Club Gold Course
The Gold is Robert Trent Jones Jr.'s serious course at Wailea, built with lava-rock walls threaded through the routing, and it is the only course on this list that examines a good player. Jones used the old lava as both hazard and frame: walls and rock features pinch landing areas, greens sit in the terrain rather than on it, and the whole round has a ruggedness the manicured resort label does not prepare you for. This is the one the low handicaps ask for by name.
The concession is that rugged cuts both ways. The Gold can feel penal in a hard trade wind, and a high handicapper having a bad day will spend it negotiating rock. Resort golf is supposed to flatter a little. The Gold declines to, which is exactly why it tops this list. In a resort town, the course that respects the player enough to test him is the course worth ranking first.
2Wailea Golf Club Emerald Course
The Emerald is the Gold's sibling and its opposite in temperament. Where the Gold interrogates, the Emerald hosts. It is widely treated around Wailea as the friendlier of the two modern courses, the one you book for a mixed group, a spouse, a first round of the trip before the Gold on day three. Flowers, ocean glimpses, room to miss. It gives up very little in conditioning or setting to do it.
Second place here is a genuine compliment and a real distinction. Played back to back, the Emerald is the round most golfers enjoy more, and the round fewer of them remember hole by hole in February. Enjoyment is a legitimate currency, and this course is rich in it. It just is not the test the Gold is, and this list ranks the test first.
3Maui Nui Golf Club
Maui Nui is the course actually in Kihei, and it jumps the Wailea Blue for third because of what that means. This is where south Maui residents play: lower green fees, a local tee sheet, a layout that has been serving the town under its current name and a previous one for decades. It does not have Wailea's polish or Wailea's lava architecture. It has something Wailea cannot sell, which is a Tuesday morning full of people who live here.
The honest limit is class. Put Maui Nui's best hole against the Gold's and the argument ends quickly. But rankings of a town's golf should count the town, and a visitor who plays only Wailea leaves knowing a resort, not Kihei. One round here fixes that, cheaply. Third, on purpose.
4Wailea Golf Club Blue Course
The Blue is Wailea's original course, the first of the three, and the simplest: an older, gentler resort layout that has been sending vacationers around happily for a long time. Nothing about it embarrasses anybody. It is also, at this point, clearly the third Wailea course, trading on the address and the views while the Gold and Emerald do the design work. When the hometown muni outranks you on a list like this, the issue is not the muni.
Play the Blue if the other tee sheets are full or the group wants the easiest walk in the complex. Just do not let a Wailea trip consist of it alone, which happens more than it should.
Late light on the Gold, the lava walls throw long shadows and the ocean below Kihei goes silver. The rock was here long before the resorts. The best course in town is the one that never pretended otherwise.