The English Open is back, and this time the route runs through the HotelPlanner Tour. The DP World Tour and England Golf have agreed to bring back one of English golf’s most familiar titles, with this year’s event staged as the English Open supported by HotelPlanner at The Vale Golf Club near Birmingham.
The tournament will carry a prize fund of £300,000 and will be played on the HotelPlanner Tour this season and next, with a view to promotion to the DP World Tour from 2028 onwards. For a competition that has spent much of the last two decades fighting for a place on the calendar, the return is a rare line of continuity. Guy Kinnings said the announcement returns one of golf’s most prestigious titles to the global stage, while Jeremy Tomlinson said England Golf is excited to enter a new partnership with the DP World Tour to promote and deliver the English Open.
That promise matters because the English Open has never had an easy modern history. The event began life as the English Golf Classic in 1979 and ran until 1983, before returning in 1988 and becoming a mainstay of the European Tour schedule until 2002. It was meant to be played again in 2009, in the same week as the PGA Championship, but the event was abandoned after St Mellion in Cornwall ran into financial difficulties. The tournament returned only in 2021 and 2022 through a multi-year deal with Cazoo, and that sponsorship ended soon after Cazoo went bust.
The revival also restores a title that once drew major names and carried real weight in the English game. Darren Clarke, Seve Ballesteros, Colin Montgomerie, Ian Woosnam and Lee Westwood are among the players who lifted the trophy, and the new agreement gives the event a clearer runway than it has had in years. Kinnings said national Opens have been a cornerstone of the international schedule for more than 50 years, rooted in tradition and built around the communities that host them. He added that the English Open’s return reflects that heritage and marks a new era in the relationship between the two organisations.
England Golf is treating the relaunch as more than a one-week stop on the schedule. Tomlinson said the event will give many young squad players a chance to experience professional tournament golf and begin acclimatising to life in the professional ranks. He also said there are clear ambitions to elevate the English Open back onto the main tour, making the tournament both a showcase and a test case for the next generation. That is the real shape of this revival: not just bringing back a name from the past, but trying to make it stick long enough to matter again.
