Town Rankings / Hawaii

The Best Golf Courses in Lahaina

North of Lahaina the road narrows and climbs into the West Maui Mountains' rain shadow, and the coastline turns into golf country of two very different kinds. Down low, Kaanapali, the resort strip that started it all. Up the coast, Kapalua, where the wind comes over the pineapple country and the PGA Tour starts its year. A Lahaina ranking is really an argument about those two addresses, ten minutes apart and a full class apart.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access. Applied honestly, that produces a runaway winner, a clear second, and two Kaanapali courses whose order matters mostly to the people who stay there.

1Kapalua Plantation Course

The Plantation Course, a Coore and Crenshaw design, opens the PGA Tour year, and television does not capture the scale of the place. The fairways run wide down mountain slopes toward the ocean, the greens are enormous, and the wind is a full participant in the architecture rather than weather that happens to it. Coore and Crenshaw built a course that looks generous and plays in the ground game: balls bounce, run, and keep thinking long after they land. Every January the best players in the world get examined by it on national television, at a resort course anyone can book. That combination barely exists in American golf.

The concession, and it is a real one, is that the Plantation can overwhelm a casual player. The scale that thrills on television means long carries of doubt, huge putts, and wind that turns a bad swing into an expensive one. Some vacationers quietly have a better day at the Bay. Noted, and overruled. This is the best course on Maui's west side and the standard every Hawaiian resort course gets measured against, mostly in vain.

2Kapalua Bay Course

The Bay Course lives in the Plantation's shadow and has made a decent career of it. It plays lower, closer to the water, with holes that run along the bay itself, and it offers the Kapalua setting (the same wind, the same coastline, the same resort polish) at a gentler grade of examination. For most resort golfers this is honestly the better day: ocean golf without the mountain scale.

Second is where it belongs and it is not close in either direction. The Bay cannot argue with the Plantation's architecture or its January stage, and it does not have to apologize to anything down the coast. If the Plantation is the reason golfers come to this end of Maui, the Bay is the reason they come back with friends who play less. A resort needs both courses. Kapalua happens to have them in the right order.

3Kaanapali Royal Golf Course

Kaanapali's Royal Course carries a genuine piece of Hawaii golf history: Kaanapali was Hawaii's first planned resort, and the Royal, opened in 1962, was its golf course. Before Kapalua, before Wailea, this was the template, resort golf on a beach strip with the hotels behind the greens. The course today is a solid, flatter resort test, generous off the tee, built for the vacation round.

It ranks third on bones and address. The layout does not do what Kapalua's courses do with terrain because it does not have their terrain, and six decades of resort golf have passed it by architecturally. But the concession cuts the other way as well: the Royal is walkable in spirit, priced below Kapalua, and sits in the middle of a resort a golfer can actually stay in and stroll. History plus convenience gets it the podium spot.

4Kaanapali Kai Golf Course

The Kai is Kaanapali's second course, the shorter and softer companion to the Royal, designed for the resort guest who wants a pleasant round rather than a test. It fills that brief without fuss. Conditioning is fine, the setting is the same beach strip, and the golf asks very little of anybody.

Fourth on a four course list, and the kindest thing to say is that it knows its assignment. If you are at Kaanapali for a week, the Kai is the recovery round between the Royal and the drive up to Kapalua. Just do not let it be the only golf you play on this coast. That would be a waste of the coast.

Every January the Tour players stand on the Plantation's elevated tees looking down at the ocean over fairways wide as pastures, and the year in golf starts again. Ten minutes south, people are playing the same coastline at half the price and having a perfectly good time. Lahaina gets to have both, and the ranking only pretends they are equals.