Pickleball Getaways offers bucket-list international trips for pickleball enthusiasts of all ages, skills
Dekel Bar has been traveling his whole life.
He grew up in Israel and his mother has a travel consulting business. That meant regular trips all over the world when he was a kid, and when he became a professional tennis player in his early 20s, that came with plenty of international travel as well.
So it makes sense that Bar has found success running a travel business of his own for more than 5 years.
Pickleball Getaways was founded by Bar along with Ben Johns in 2019, and together they organize more than a dozen trips per year with groups of 32-80 players.
The trips include clinics with Johns (No. 1 men’s player in the world), Bar (multiple-time PPA Tour gold medalist) and a rotating cast of pro players and coaches at world-class resorts and destinations.
“It’s been fun to watch the business grow over the years,” Bar said. “We started out doing a couple trips each year, and now we’re doing about 15 trips per year, and we have a lot more pros who are involved and some really good coaches as well. It has worked out really well with me being so familiar with the travel industry and both of us obviously being very involved in the pickleball community and playing on tour.”
Pickleball Getaways offers more than a dozen trips per year in several countries. Upcoming trips include: Costa Rica, Turks and Caicos, Mexico, Antigua, Vietnam and Dominican Republic.
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Johns family connection leads to opportunity
Bar first connected with Collin Johns when the two were both playing professional tennis internationally in the mid-2010s. Eventually they became close friends, and when Collin’s younger brother – Ben – was first getting into pro pickleball, he introduced Collin and Bar to the growing sport.
Ben Johns wasn’t the star that he is now, but he was still one of the bigger names in the sport at the time and was teaching small clinics around the U.S.
“I thought it could be interesting to do some of those pickleball clinics overseas, so we started looking into it to see if the demand was there and where we could go,” Bar said. “Ben was still very young (18 at the time), but he was one of the better players and people were starting to know who he was. He was also a great teacher and had a very high-level understanding of the game even then.”
Their first trip was to Mexico in January 2019 with a group of 40 people, and they followed that up with a trip to Ecuador that August with 16 guests.
“It was just me and Ben on the trips at the time, and the response we got from those first two trips was incredible,” Bar said. “Almost everybody we took there told us it was the best trip they’d ever been on, so it was pretty clear to us after those trips that we had a good model and it was something people were interested in.”
Pickleball Getaways expansion: More countries, bigger groups
Pickleball Getaways has grown exponentially since the early days when it was just Johns and Bar on the trips.
They now have a full staff to help with bookings/travel logistics and on-site coordinators to make sure everything stays on schedule during the getaways.
A typical trip involves clinics and open play sessions each day, as well as site-seeing opportunities that are dependent on the destination. For trips to places like Mexico and Antigua, guests are staying at an all-inclusive resort and there are a couple opportunities to leave the resort to explore the area.
For other destinations like Europe and Vietnam, there’s more of an emphasis on site-seeing, Bar said.
“It depends on what you want – if you want a little bit of touring, no touring, a lot of touring – we have all those options,” Bar said. “For our destinations in Europe and Asia, the site-seeing is a big part of the trip for a lot of people, so we want to make sure we have a good balance of that as well as time on the pickleball court.”
Bar scouts many of the trips himself ahead of time, and his travel-expert mother also helps find new locations.
“We do a lot of work ahead of the trips to make sure everywhere we go is well thought of and is a good fit for our groups,” he said. “If we’re going to a new place, you can trust that we’ve been there ourselves and we know it will be a great experience for guests. That level of detail and organization is really important for us, and we’ve done so many trips now that we know what people need and how to run things.”
Currently the trips involve anywhere from 32-80 guests, and Bar said he’s found that larger groups make for a better experience because it guarantees that people will always have similarly skilled players to play with.
If they have 60+ people on a trip, they split everybody into two groups for the clinics and usually have 6-7 pros – that means the student-to-teacher ratio is always about 5-1. Besides Johns and Bar, who are on a handful of the trips per year, other pros have included Lacy Schneemann, Tina Pisnik, Vivian Glozman, Irina Tereschenko, Rob Cassidy, Michelle Esquivel, Len Yang and more.
“It’s always players that both Ben and I know well and people we trust – they are all really good coaches,” Bar said. “When guests fill out their survey at the end of the trip, the coaches are always the highest rated category. People rave about the coaching and that’s something we take very seriously because ultimately people are going on a trip like this because they want to get better.”
Trips often sell out 6-12 months in advance, which is why Bar is always working on adding more destinations.
Many of the guests on each trip are returners who have first-hand experience with Pickleball Getaways. And in a lot of those cases they are bringing a handful of their friends with them. That’s how the company grew initially, Bar said, and it’s something they take a lot of pride in.
“It’s been a lot of work to get us to this point, but it’s been a ton of fun doing all of it and just seeing how the company has grown along with pickleball,” Bar said. “It’s so fulfilling for me to see how happy people are at the end of the trip and hear all the stories about the new friends they met and connections they made. Most of the time they’re already planning their next trip, which is really rewarding for us.”
