Carnoustie wins Open Championship bid, but there’s more to the story

In 2029, the Open Championship will return to Carnoustie Golf Links, long heralded as one of the major’s most difficult venues. The decision, announced Monday by the R&A, feels like a no-brainer on its surface. Of course they’re headed back to one of the best golf courses on the planet.

But it came with secondary questions: Why go there before Muirfield? Or Turnberry? 

As the Open continues to grow in size, popularity and economic importance, decisions like this one are never just about revisiting an old stop on the event’s rota. Carnoustie’s placement, this time, is a much deeper conversation. 

It mostly starts with who owns Carnoustie Golf Links, which has changed since the last time it hosted, in 2018. It was a rollicking summer that year, when Carnoustie was burnt to a crisp and where Tiger Woods formally reestablished himself as a major-championship contender. Francesco Molinari was your winner during a week where the total attendance reached 172,000. That’s a big number — but also a number that has been beaten soundly, on repeat, at Opens since. 

This year’s Open at Royal Birkdale tallied more than 300,000 patrons across eight days. The Open prior, at Royal Portrush, set records for Opens held away from St. Andrews. And the 2022 Open, at the Old in St. Andrews, reached 290,000. It will undoubtedly topple that number again next year when it hosts again. In other words: a truly massive number of people descend upon these small towns, bringing massive economic value with them. It’s good to be at the center of that value, and the Carnoustie’s county, Angus, knows that well. 

But all the way back in 2018, according to presentations made in recent years by the Angus Council, investors keyed in on Carnoustie’s economics. The Golf Links were managed by a charity, which had done a fine job for a long while. The Golf Links does a lot of business — about 130,000 rounds annually — but nowhere near the business of, say, the St. Andrews Links Trust just 12 miles south. The town itself cannot provide the same accommodations as St. Andrews, nor the same proximity to Scotland’s capital city, Edinburgh, and its international airport. According to a report from The Scotsman, Angus Council decided it might be more sustainable to let a different group make the most of its courses. 

Max Herberstein led a consortium of investors whose pitch centered on making Carnoustie — a town of roughly 11,000 people — a stronger tourism destination via its world-leading golf course. They promised local golfers would maintain access to the courses deep into the future, and also promised renovations to the hotel and major investment in the property. That meant not just impacting the Championship course at the Carnoustie links, but the two other courses as well (Burnside and Buddon). But their pitch all seemed to revolve around the Open, and making sure the R&A visits Carnoustie constantly — not just for the men’s Open, but for the Senior Open and the Women’s Open, too. 

Unlike the USGA’s hosting decisions for the U.S. Open, the R&A announces its future Open sites with a much shorter forecast. For example, it’s unclear where the 2029 Senior and Women’s Opens will be held. Only this week was it announced that Carnoustie gets to host the men’s Open again, less than three years away. The R&A is perpetually in conversation with its rotation of hosts, routinely bringing in course designers for alterations and assessing the logistics of tiny towns accommodating hundreds of thousands of visitors. In other words, the R&A, with its pursuit of making the Open as big as it can possibly be, needs periodic reassurance that these centuries-old courses and their surrounds are capable of doing it like they never have before. 

Those calculations are a significant part of why Muirfield and Turnberry were passed up for the 2029 Open: both hold their own logistical issues that R&A leadership has pointed to repeatedly. Muirfield has reportedly been asked to alter its property to create more space for massive crowds. Turnberry, down the western coast of Scotland, has been listed as a logistical difficulty for those crowds, which require parking and easy transport to an otherwise quiet part of the country. Both courses have drastically different ownership groups with different agendas than the newest group involved at Carnoustie, which has seemed wholly focused on earning the next available Open. You don’t have to squint hard to see the value proposition: if it’s good for business (and for Monterey, California) that Pebble Beach hosts U.S. Opens twice every decade, it has to be similarly valuable to their counterparts in the U.K. And private investment is, clearly, way ahead of us on these world-famous golf assets.

In 2023 Herberstein’s investment group bought the Carnoustie Golf Hotel for roughly £10 million. Not long later, a wider vision was pitched to the local community. The pitch clarified that without recurring visits from the Open, the local economy would miss its trickle-down effects. The positive flip-side of that idea, of course, is that economic gains from constantly being on the R&A’s agenda would keep golfers from all over the world visiting the area and spending money in Carnoustie. It was made clear by incumbent Carnoustie executives that in order to properly host a modern Open, the Carnoustie Hotel would have to be renovated, and Herberstein’s group pledged their commitment to it. In early 2025, the group officially reached an agreement with Angus Council and the charity running the courses to let it take over the day-to-day operations for eight years, with the intent to establish a longer deal in the future. That company is Carnoustie Golf Heritage and Hospitality Group Limited.  

According to business documents filed in the U.K., Herberstein owns around 40% of the company, and a mix of a few dozen other entities make up the remainder, including its second director, Paul Lisiak. In a quick token of appreciation, Herberstein, Lisiak and CGHH hosted an event honoring the long-serving caddies of Carnoustie, less than two months after taking over. It was one of the first signs that this wasn’t some faraway entity sliding in to take over the books and squeeze out locals. Its proposals to the Angus Council called for numerous investments in the hotel, the courses and even the surrounding area. And about 18 months later, here we are. It won’t be long before 2029 attendees start making Airbnb reservations.

CGHH bought the ancient Simpson’s Golf Shop across the street from Carnoustie’s 18th green, an iconic, beloved entity that proudly boasts as the second-oldest golf shop in the world. Not long after, they released plans to make the shop a historical monument to Robert Simpson, the clubmaker and course designer who worked alongside Old Tom Morris. In some ways, the future Simpson’s will match the moves made around the Old Course in St. Andrews, which has developed The Old Course Shop across the street from its 18th green, and the R&A Museum, which sits just beyond the 18th. 

Reported plans for the hotel expansion call for 25 more rooms and an upgraded experience focused on luxury. That comes in addition to a recently-reported £12 million already spent acquiring and redeveloping projects in the area. CGHH bought a local bar and turned it into a modern, swanky cafe named Maxi’s, which doubles as a cocktail bar. It is situated quite perfectly between the 18th green and the Carnoustie train station, and will have plenty of gravitational pull in July 2029. If you happen to be one of the lucky few [hundred thousand] who visit that week, just remember:

You’ve been part of the plans all along.