The Most Beautiful Tennis Courts in the World: Top Destinations
A regulation tennis court has been 2,808 square feet since Major Walter Clopton Wingfield patented lawn tennis in 1874, but the landscape surrounding those 2,808 square feet has never been worth more to the hospitality industry than it is right now. Golf dominated resort programming for a century because it consumed acreage and signaled wealth, but the economics have flipped: a single tennis court occupies a fraction of one fairway, generates comparable revenue per square foot and—thanks to padel, the glass-walled doubles format that has quadrupled its global player base to over 35 million since 2018 and now counts 77,000 courts across 150 countries—can be stacked, lit and programmed into a social venue that guests actually use instead of guiltily ignoring for the pool.
When Luca Guadagnino‘s Challengers grossed $96 million and turned Zendaya in a tennis skirt into the defining fashion image of 2024, the last cultural barrier fell: the court stopped being an amenity and became the destination. U.S. tennis participation has since surged 54 percent to 27.3 million players, coaching academies run by Grand Slam champions now anchor entire resort identities, and the facilities going up in 2025 and 2026 are not the neglected hard courts behind the spa that most travelers remember from childhood.
The question, then, is where. The best hotel tennis courts make the same implicit promise: that the setting will be so distractingly beautiful you will forgive yourself for losing. What follows are 12 courts—on cliffs, across private islands, above seas named by Homer—where the scenery reliably wins that competition.
