A Tennis Hotel Is a Court Count and a Coach
Almost every luxury resort on earth has a tennis court, and almost all of them will tell you they are a tennis destination. The claim is cheap, because the things that decorate it are cheap: a capsule collection with a racquet brand, a champion flown in for a clinic weekend, a photograph of a court at golden hour. Those cost a season and buy a year of press.
The things that are not cheap are the number of courts a property actually maintains, what those courts are surfaced with, and whether there is someone paid to stand on the other side of the net in the month you happen to visit. Court space cannot be conjured. A second surface means a second maintenance regime. A resident coaching operation is a payroll line, not a partnership announcement.
So we counted. What follows is ten properties, ordered by the depth of the facility rather than the glamour of the setting, with every court count taken from what the property itself publishes and verified in September 2026. Where a resort publishes rates, we give them. Where it does not, we say so rather than estimate.
Tortuga Bay, Puntacana Resort — Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
The most serious tennis facility on this list, and by a distance. The Oscar de la Renta Tennis Center, named for the designer whose creative direction runs through the Tortuga Bay villas and the resort’s Bamboo restaurant, maintains twelve courts across four surfaces: five Har-Tru, five caliche, one hard and one grass. Eleven of the twelve are in play at present.
Four surfaces in one place is rare anywhere outside a national training center, and it is the strongest evidence on this list of a facility built by people who play rather than people who photograph. A player preparing for a clay season and a player preparing for a grass season can train at the same resort in the same week. LUX Tennis, the coaching operation that also runs Amanzoe and Bürgenstock, manages the center and its coaching program, and four padel courts and two pickleball courts now sit alongside the tennis. The resort does not publish court fees or clinic rates.
Rancho Valencia Resort & Spa — Rancho Santa Fe, California
Fifteen tennis courts, which is more than most tennis clubs: twelve Plexipave and three European red clay, on a terracotta and adobe property twenty minutes inland from the Pacific. Tennis here is not an amenity bolted onto a spa. It is the organizing principle of the place.
The Rafa Nadal Academy connection is the part worth flying for, because it is not a photo call. The resort runs the official Rafael Nadal junior and adult camp on its own courts, taught to Academy methodology, and the July 2026 junior session for ages eight to seventeen sold out into a waitlist at $1,050. Eduardo Sanchez is the head tennis and padel pro. General court and clinic pricing is not published. Three padel courts and four pickleball courts now sit alongside the tennis.
High Hampton Resort — Cashiers, North Carolina
Four Har-Tru clay courts and one hard court in the Blue Ridge Mountains, laid out beside a dahlia garden with a sheer rock face filling the view behind them. It is the most beautiful setting on this list that you can drive to, and the clay is the right choice for it: Har-Tru plays slow and cool, which is what you want at elevation in August.
The courts themselves were developed and designed under the direction of Andy Roddick, a part-time Cashiers resident. That is a design credit rather than a standing commitment, and we checked: there is no present-day coaching role attached to his name. Court reservations carry no fee for Inn guests and instruction costs extra, though the rate is not published. The property also maintains six pickleball courts, one more than it has tennis courts.
Bürgenstock Resort — Lake Lucerne, Switzerland
Three courts five hundred meters above the lake, and the most interesting engineering on this list. Two of them sit indoors beneath the timber Diamond Domes, which is the entire reason this is a genuine year-round tennis property in a canton that spends months under snow. The enclosed pair are carpet; the third, outdoors, is synthetic clay.
Bürgenstock is also the only property here carrying two coaching operations at once. LUX Tennis runs the day-to-day center, while the resort’s own shop sells Rafa Nadal Academy by Movistar camp packages for teens and adults. Neither publishes rates. Three courts is a small facility by the standards of the two above, but no other property on this list will guarantee you a court in February.
Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc — Antibes, France
Five red clay courts set among Aleppo pines and olive trees, and the oldest tennis on this list by decades: the courts date to 1923 and have been in continuous use on the Cap ever since. There is a specific pleasure in playing on a surface that has been maintained, swept and watered daily, for a century. The hotel counts Suzanne Lenglen among the players who used them: La Divine, the first great international star of the women’s game, lived along the coast in Nice in the 1930s and came here to play.
The courts are reserved for resident guests, and there is a fee both for court time and for lessons. Coaching is arranged on request rather than run as a standing program, which is the honest shape of tennis at a hotel where tennis is one pleasure among many rather than the reason to come. Courts are booked, with or without a lesson, through the concierge.
Round Hill Hotel and Villas — Montego Bay, Jamaica
Three Har-Tru clay courts and one hard court on a cliffside estate above Montego Bay, with the courts set under palms and the sea below them. Round Hill runs a director of tennis and in-house professionals alongside visiting clinicians, rather than a branded academy, and past sessions have included Bianca Andreescu.
It also earns a distinction nobody else on this list does: it publishes its prices. Private lessons run $45 for thirty minutes to $80 for the hour, semi-private $30 to $50 per person, an hour with the director $125, and clinics $25 per person. In a category where nearly every property answers a rate question with a phone number, a published price list is a form of confidence. Four pickleball courts match the tennis count.
Amanzoe — Porto Heli, Greece
Two floodlit hard courts on a hilltop above the Argolic Gulf, run by LUX Tennis Academy, whose coaches are drawn from ATP and WTA professional backgrounds. Two courts is a modest facility, and Amanzoe’s standing on a tennis list rests less on the courts themselves than on the fact that the group has made recovery a formal discipline rather than a spa menu item.
Aman named Novak Djokovic its first Global Ambassador and Wellness Advisor in 2024, and the resulting three-day Mobility and Recovery Programme runs at Amanzoe alongside Amanyara, Amanoi and Aman Nai Lert Bangkok. It is a conditioning itinerary, with mobility assessment, contrast therapy and strength work, and a tennis session slotted from ten to eleven on the second morning. Aman’s own page states plainly that Djokovic will not be in attendance, which is more candor than this genre usually offers. When he does come in person, Aman announces it as an event. After an inaugural retreat at Amanyara last year, he will host a second retreat, Stillness and Strength, at Amanjena, outside Marrakech, from December 18 to 20, 2026: three days of tennis masterclasses he leads himself, mindfulness sessions and menus he has curated, on the resort’s clay courts, with strictly limited spaces. Amanzoe also runs Building Mental Resilience, developed in partnership with Maria Sharapova, who likewise does not host it in person. It pairs a sixty minute hitting session with a professional against movement, meditation and recovery work.
Épi 1959 Baie de Pampelonne — Ramatuelle, France
Two red clay courts behind the gates of a members-only club on Pampelonne beach, and the property that best fits what Off the Deck usually covers: the tennis here belongs to a club that happens to have rooms, not to a hotel that happens to have courts. Founded in 1959 by Jean Castel and owned by the McCourt family since 2018, it now carries its founding year in its name.
John McEnroe is the figure behind the tennis program, and the reason Thom Browne’s tennis pro shop, the designer’s first standalone address in France, opened on the property in 2022. A local pro coaches guests, which is the arrangement that matters, since McEnroe is not there most of the time. Access is by prior request and recommendation. Nothing is published: not rates, not availability.
Bawah Reserve — Anambas Islands, Indonesia
Two grass courts in the middle of the South China Sea, which is two more grass courts than almost any resort on earth maintains. One sits on the main island near the permaculture gardens; the second is on Elang, the private island residence that is rented whole. You arrive by seaplane, and the reserve supplies racquets and balls, because nobody packs them for that flight.
There is no coaching program and no named pro, and the property is honest about that. Bawah belongs on this list for the improbability of the surface rather than the depth of the tennis. Grass is the most maintenance-hungry court there is, and keeping two of them alive on a remote equatorial island is a groundskeeping feat, not a training facility.
Cromlix Hotel — Kinbuck, Stirlingshire
A Victorian estate near Dunblane owned by Andy and Kim Murray since 2013, with a single outdoor court painted in Wimbledon’s green and purple. One court is the smallest tennis offering on this list, and it is here on the strength of whose court it is rather than how much tennis you can play on it.
Cromlix closed in January 2026 and reopened in May after a six-month redevelopment that delivered two restaurants, Cradle and the Garden Room, new suites, and a Woodland Retreat wellness offering. The court came through it intact and is still in play. You would not know that from the hotel’s own site, which now leads with dining and wellness and does not mention the tennis anywhere, so the court is easier to find in person than online.
The quiet story across these ten properties is not tennis at all. It is the small courts. Round Hill maintains four pickleball courts against four tennis courts. High Hampton has six pickleball courts against five tennis courts. Rancho Valencia has added three padel and four pickleball. Puntacana runs four padel courts and two pickleball courts beside the finest four-surface tennis center on this list.
Padel and pickleball take less land, fill faster, teach more easily, and turn over more guests per hour. At a resort, court space is the one thing that cannot be conjured, so a resort that adds a padel court is usually deciding not to add a tennis court. That is not a complaint. It is the single most useful thing to understand about resort tennis in 2026, because it tells you which way the inventory is moving.
Which leaves a simple test for anyone choosing a hotel for the tennis rather than for the photographs. Ask how many courts. Ask what they are surfaced with. Ask the name of the person who will be coaching you in the month you are actually there. The properties that answer all three without hesitating, Puntacana and Rancho Valencia and Bürgenstock among them, are the ones where the tennis was never the marketing.
Lead image: the tennis court at Cromlix, Kinbuck. Photo: Cromlix.