If you’ve tried booking a Bandon Dunes trip in the past five years or so, you know how tough it has become. Add in golf’s boom in popularity with the scarce availability of lodging at golf’s best resort, and it’s been common to hear that the Oregon resort was booked for the next two years. That was true.

RELATED: The fascinating reason one of the world’s best oceanside holes was almost never built

To help golfers hoping to book a Bandon Dunes trip soon, the resort has launched a new lottery system to give everybody a chance at reserving their dream trip.

“It’s an honor that so many golfers want to visit Bandon Dunes,” said general manager Jeff Simonds. “Over the past year we’ve been working on our future reservations processes. Our hold times for 2025 reservations were extremely long, and we’ve been working to adapt and improve the process for everyone. We tested a similar random drawing and outbound booking approach for the fourth quarter of 2025 and found that it saved guests and our team significant time. It’s all about striving to provide the best possible guest booking experience.” 

Here’s a look at how it works:

There will be three reservation windows for 2026 broken into times of the year:

Registration will close Dec. 22, 2024 for all January-April 2026 trips.Registration will close Jan. 19, 2025 for May-Sept. 2026 trips.Registration will close April 20, 2025 for Oct.-Dec. 2026 trips.

RELATED: America’s best courses on the water, ranked

After the registration windows close, the resort will inform the winners of the random drawing via email that they were selected, giving folks the opportunity to book their trips in the order in which they were selected.

Even though it’ll be tough to win the lottery, at least there’s hope that you just need a little luck to secure a trip to golf’s best resort.

Bandon Dunes has continued to add to its leading golf offerings, with five 18-hole courses nationally ranked by Golf Digest. Pacific Dunes (21st), Bandon Dunes (40th), Bandon Trails (65th) and Old Macdonald (72nd) are all mainstays on America’s 100 Greatest rankings and Sheep Ranch debuted at 115th in our most recent Second 100 Greatest. We’ll see if it moves into our top 100 when our next rankings are published in a few months.

The resort, the vision of Michael Keiser, celebrated 25 years in 2024 and now contains two short courses as well: Bandon Preserve, one of the best par-3 courses in the world, designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, and Shorty’s, a 19-hole par-3 course built by Rod Whitman, Dave Axland and Keith Cutten, also opened this year.

For more information on booking a trip to Bandon Dunes, visit the resort’s website.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com