Planning a Masters trip, are you? You’ve come to the right place. No, we can’t offer you tickets — and you certainly can’t have my press pass — but we can offer some guidance on what a Masters trip might do to your bank account. That way you can plan ahead for your future (and epic) Masters adventure.
Let’s break down the numbers.
Masters tickets
We’ll start here, because you can’t go to Augusta National unless you have tickets. Here’s the bad news: Masters tickets are hard to get. The good news? They are affordable! (As long as you win the lottery.) To get Masters tickets you need to sign up for the aforementioned lottery, and if you win you’ll have a chance to redeem your tickets. It’s $100 for practice rounds this year and $140 for tournament rounds.
There’s also something called a Masters series badge, which an undisclosed number of lucky patrons get to redeem every single year. Those grant access for all four tournament days and, no, don’t even try, the sign up for the waiting list hasn’t opened in two decades. Those with badges paid $450 this year.
That’s a steal, though. One week before the tournament started, one ticket resale company’s site was charging $8,862 for a series badge. Single-day tickets were rough, too: a Wednesday practice round ticket was $1,616, and a Sunday tournament round was $1,160.
How you (yes, you!) can play Augusta National Golf Club
There are also several companies that provide Masters experiences, where — for a hefty price — they’ll take care of your tickets, lodging, transportation and more. So you could always explore that route as well.
Masters travel
Depending on where you are located, you might need a flight to the Masters. Luckily there are lots of options. There are major airports in Atlanta (2 hours, 15 minutes driving) and Charlotte (2 hours, 30 minutes), and Columbia, S.C. (1 hour, 15 minutes) is even closer. Shop around and you can find good flight options, sometimes as low as $250 but obviously higher the later you wait or depending on how desirable the flight times are. (I booked for as low as $200 one year but this year didn’t get so lucky.)
You’ll need a car rental for those airports, though, which will cost $400-700 or so, depending on the size of the vehicle or how long you book it for. But there’s also another option if you want to skip the car entirely.
Augusta, Ga., has its own smaller airport — and it adds more direct flights to popular hubs during Masters week — but that’s also going to cost extra. Depending on when you book, this flight could cost anywhere from $400 to over $1,000. On the plus side, you’ll already be in Augusta, so you could skip getting a rental car. There are plenty of Ubers during Masters week.
Masters lodging
Oh, there are options. You can rent homes in Augusta for your crew, anything from $500 a night for smaller places, around $1,000 for more modest homes or significantly more for places that have extra bedrooms, more space and loads of amenities.
There’s also the hotel route, although the local spots take advantage of the demand and prices skyrocket. Sure, you can stay at some, uh, less desirable spots for $150-200, but if you want something with a little more comfort it’s going to be around $300-500, or sometimes even closer to $1,000, especially if you want to be near the course.
Masters miscellaneous
You need to eat, right? There’s breakfast at the Waffle House, $40 for food and drinks at the course — luckily you can get a lot for that — and a dinner out on the town later that night. You can go cheap there too, but you might as well get the full Augusta/Masters experience and live it up, grab a steak and loaded baked potato at TBonz or grab something a little fancier downtown.
But let’s be honest, you can’t go to the Masters without dropping a couple hundred bucks in the Golf Shop. A quarter-zip for yourself, a polo for your father-in-law and a hat for your brother or sister. It adds up. Some people drop $1,000 easy, stocking up for their man caves, for the holidays or, usually, because they might never be back again.
Parting thoughts
Expensive? It’s really not that bad if you cash in on the lottery, where tickets are a fraction of what they go for on the secondary market and are significantly less than what it would cost to go to a Super Bowl. Sure, you can splurge on a lux rental home if you want, but as long as you get lottery tickets, book a flight in advance and stay at a somewhat modest place, a Masters trip still comes out to be one of the best, most affordable bucket-list trips in sports.
And if you wanted to go crazy and really spend some money? Hey, when in Augusta…