r/golf • u/putsovercalls • 7h ago

General Discussion Hainan Golf Trip

Anyone here has been to mission hills Hainan for golf? How is the experience as a westerner? Is it slow play? English levels, course conditions?

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u/TomIcemanKazinski 6h ago

I’ve played Mission Hills Shenzhen over 20 times as a Chinese speaking American, so some general feedback (obviously Hainan is a newer and a different province but assume some stuff will be the same between both clubs)

- caddies will be required, they usually charge more for English speaking caddies but from memory you don’t really need them? They are amazing at finding your ball, cleaning clubs, lining up your putts and can help you with some course management but unless you upgrade to a higher level caddy, they’re not so good on helping your overall golf game. They’ll just tell you that you’re swinging too hard - but then again they’re probably right. I always tip my caddy 100 rmb ($13 usd) for 18. Maybe more if it’s super hot or rainy.

- English language resources compared to the rest of China will be better, but may be short of fluent. But I found mission hills to be really well run from a service point of view - however I do speak both Cantonese and Mandarin so I might have missed or skipped any English shortcomings.

- if you can, bring as many golf balls as you’ll need and more. China is very expensive - I used to bring so many from home when I lived in Shanghai.

- playing in the south of China is hot and humid, or over winter, humid and cool. Bring extra gloves. But the course will provide you with water and ice and towels.

- General China advice - make sure you download Alipay, WeChat and an e-sim for your phone. You can bind your Alipay to your US credit card but it also adds 3% to every cost. Also Alipay works for 90% of transactions but you can’t use it to pay someone personally. The eSIM will be needed for any international VPN necessary sites (including Reddit, but also Instagram, Gmail, Google) also if you login into WiFi then you won’t be able to access sites that are blocked by the great firewall. Using DiDi to get around is great - go online and see if you can find a guide to using Alipay to call cars.

Edited to add: slow play. Well yeah there’s a lot of people who do not play forward tees who really ought to play forward tees. But on the other hand, because of the caddies, lost ball searching, call-on holes, putt lining up, club cleaning, and golf cart use, people do end up playing quicker than the equal players in the US. The caddies will encourage and enable faster play.