In the world of premium leisure, the most enduring partnerships are built not on transactional convenience but on shared identity.
When Chart Hills Golf Club, home to one of England’s finest championship courses, announced its partnership with Chapel Down, the country’s leading wine producer, the move was immediately understood by those familiar with both brands as something more than a marketing arrangement.
It was a natural alignment of two institutions that have each, independently, come to define what excellence looks like in the Garden of England.
The collaboration, which has launched as a bespoke Stay and Play offer, gives guests a seamlessly curated itinerary:
- championship golf on a Sir Nick Faldo-designed course,
- an overnight stay in the club’s luxury accommodation, and
- a guided tour and tutored tasting at Chapel Down‘s award-winning winery.
On paper, it sounds like a pleasant weekend away. In practice, it is a masterclass in experiential hospitality, and a model that other luxury leisure brands would do well to study.
Why This Partnership Makes Perfect Sense
To grasp the strategic logic of this collaboration, one must first understand what each brand brings to the table — and how those elements naturally fit together.
Chart Hills Golf Club is no ordinary golf club. Its championship course, designed by six-time Major winner Sir Nick Faldo, is Europe’s first Signature Faldo design and has recently been ranked in the Golf World Top 100 of England.
The club is preparing to host The English Legends on the Staysure Legends Tour from 28th to 30th August, welcoming a field of Major champions, Ryder Cup players, and some of the most recognizable names in European golf.
The estate also features The Barn, a luxury accommodation offering of four en suite bedrooms for up to eight guests, a genuinely premium proposition in a region not short of fine places to stay.
Chapel Down, for its part, is one of England’s leading wine producers, acclaimed for its sparkling and still wines and renowned as a visitor destination in its own right.
Its winery offers guided vineyard and winery tours, tutored tastings, and dining at The Swan, a restaurant with serious culinary credentials.
Both brands are rooted in Kent. Both are committed to quality and to the kind of carefully crafted visitor experience that turns a day out into a lasting memory.
The partnership, as Chart Hills General Manager Anthony Tarchetti puts it, is about “showcasing the very best of Kent through a joined-up visitor experience.” That phrase — joined-up — is doing a great deal of work, and it is worth unpacking.
The Synergies Are Real — And Commercially Compelling
The partnership generates synergy at multiple levels, from brand positioning to visitor economics.
At the most fundamental level, both brands serve the same premium consumer.
The golfer who travels to play a Faldo-designed course ranked among England’s finest is, culturally and demographically, exactly the consumer who appreciates a guided tour of a leading English winery and a tutored tasting of award-winning sparkling wine.
These are people who pay for curation. They do not want a good golf course near a decent winery. They want an experience that has been thought through, edited, and presented with intention.
The package Chart Hills Golf Club and Chapel Down has created delivers exactly that.
For £279 per person Monday to Thursday, or £329 per person Friday to Sunday, guests receive
- one night in The Barn,
- complimentary breakfast in the Club Bar,
- two rounds on the championship course,
- unlimited use of the practice facilities,
- a guided vineyard and winery tour at Chapel Down, and
- a tutored tasting of the producer’s award-winning sparkling and still wines.
Private groups of up to eight guests can book an exclusive option that includes a private vineyard tour and tasting.
Those wishing to extend the experience further can add a meal at The Swan at Chapel Down or explore the nearby market town of Tenterden for local restaurant options.
The economics of the arrangement are equally logical.
Both businesses operate in the experience economy, where the value of a visit is measured not just by the quality of a single product, a round of golf, a glass of wine, but by the richness of the total encounter.
By extending the visitor journey across two premium venues, both Chart Hills Golf Club and Chapel Down increase dwell time, spend per head, and, crucially, the likelihood of repeat visitation and genuine word-of-mouth advocacy.
A Sense Of Place That Money Can’t Manufacture
There is something else at work here that is harder to quantify but arguably more valuable than the commercial mechanics: a shared sense of place.
Kent has long carried the epithet “the Garden of England,” but in recent years that reputation has been underpinned by a new wave of premium producers, in food, in drink, in hospitality, who are making the county a genuine destination for discerning travelers.
Chart Hills Golf Club and Chapel Down are two of the most prominent names in that story.
Gavin Kean, Brand Home Manager at Chapel Down, articulates the philosophy behind the partnership with clarity.
“At Chapel Down, our focus has always been on creating meaningful visitor experiences that connect people with our vineyards, our wines and the landscape around us,” he notes.
“Working with Chart Hills allows us to extend that experience beyond the winery, offering guests a broader sense of place that celebrates the quality and craftsmanship on offer in Kent.”
That language – quality & craftsmanship – echoes across both brands.
A Faldo-designed golf course is, at its core, a work of craft: fairways shaped to reward strategic thought, bunkering placed to test and occasionally punish, greens designed to separate the careful from the careless.
English sparkling wine, made by the Traditional Method in soils not unlike those of Champagne, is similarly the product of patient, skilled, place-specific craft.
The two things belong in the same sentence. They belong, it turns out, in the same package.
A Blueprint For Destination Leisure
What Chart Hills Golf Club and Chapel Down have created is worth examining as a template.
The luxury leisure sector has spent years discussing “experiential” offerings, often producing itineraries that feel assembled rather than genuinely conceived.
The Chart Hills–Chapel Down partnership avoids that trap because it is built on authenticity: two excellent brands, in genuine proximity, serving a genuinely overlapping audience, in a region that fully warrants the label “destination.”
For the discerning traveler — the one who wants their weekend to feel as carefully composed as a well-made wine or a beautifully designed golf hole — this is, frankly, exactly what they have been waiting for.
The partnership between Chart Hills Golf Club and Chapel Down is not a marketing stunt.
It is a considered, well-matched collaboration between two institutions that understand their audience, respect their craft, and share a county with purpose.
In a sector crowded with partnerships of convenience, that kind of alignment is genuinely rare.
And in Kent, on a Faldo fairway, with a glass of award-winning English sparkling wine in hand, it is also rather magnificent.