Like many of you, I love traveling with my golf clubs. Also like many of you, I always feel a jolt to my sense of well-being when I check in at the airport. Every time I watch my bag glide away on the conveyor belt feels a little like the day I dropped off my second-born for his first day of kindergarten. His older sister survived just fine, but I still worried a little.
We’ve all seen those social media videos of golf bags getting mistreated on the tarmac. However, in all my years of golf travel, I’ve never had a club damaged. That could mean that I’m worried for nothing or it could simply mean that my number is about to come up.
That thin slice of existence between doubt and fear is why Ayr Support exists.
Ayr Support is the work of a gent named Tyler Beckley and it won the Best New Product award at this year’s PGA Show. It’s an inflatable cushion that sits in your travel bag to give your carbon steel and titanium babies a nice layer of protection as they nestle in the belly of a flying behemoth.
It’s a product that, in my mind, anyway, brings up many, many questions. We’ll try to answer as many as we can.
What is Ayr Support?
There’s a reason, dear readers, why airlines make you sign a damage waiver if you don’t use a hard case when you travel with your golf clubs.
“If you think about golf travel bags, they’re just open canvas containers to put your stuff in,” Beckley tells MyGolfSpy. “They don’t do anything else other than that.”
There’s also a lot of open space in a travel bag, even after you’ve loaded in shoes, extra towels and anything else you can cram in there. And open space means stuff can move.
And if stuff can move, stuff can break.
“If we can keep your bag from rotating or flopping around, it’s going to prevent movement and prevent things from breaking.”
Beckley travels more than most people. He’s a technical director in the broadcast sports world. He’s worked the PGA Tour (including the Masters) and the NFL for CBS. He currently travels the globe, literally, working Ultimate Fighting Championship events.
“Last year, I actually did a complete loop around the work in one trip. We did Saudi Arabia and Australia in back-to-back weeks, with a few days for golf in Thailand.”
His journey to Ayr Support started about 16 months ago. He was looking for a new travel cover and wanted more protection. There was nothing that satisfied him so he started looking at things like pool noodles. He even made a foam and cardboard frame.
Beckley wasn’t satisfied with these homemade solutions
“I got tired of using towels or clothes or other things that just didn’t help that much. There’s got to be a better way, right?”
The lightbulb moment came when he tried a pool float that he bought on Amazon.
The birth of an inflatable idea
The pool float provided the inspiration Beckley needed so he decided to turn it into a business
It wasn’t as easy as you’d think.
“I found a manufacturer who had a material we thought would be durable enough. I took it with me on every trip and I’d inflate it and deflate it at least once a day to see if it would stand up.”
Turns out, it didn’t.
This first prototype didn’t cut it, either.
“My supplier told me he had another material, a TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane) that was a lot more durable but a lot more expensive. I told him we can’t do it with what we were using before so he made one up and sent it to me.”
That one did the trick. Beckley has been using that prototype himself for nearly a year with close to 100,000 airmiles on it with no issues.
The Ayr Support TPU liner inflates before going into your travel bag.
“As part of the demo, I’ll step on my bag, I’ll throw 40 pounds worth of dumbbells on it. On Instagram, I dropped a 50-pound scuba tank on the Ayr Support. The tank bounced three feet away but my clubs weren’t touched at all.”
With all that, I know you have questions. Let’s start with the biggie.
What happens if/when it pops?
That’s the obvious question, isn’t it?
“Holes and things of that nature are always a possibility,” says Beckley. “We thought about that so we have a one-year, no-questions-asked warranty. We’re that confident in the material.”
The only thing the warranty doesn’t cover is intentional damage with a knife or something similar.
“We’re not sending a patch kit with it. If it develops a leak, send it back to me.”
We can say Ayr Support is pretty beefy and appears plenty durable. Beckley says he will likely offer a patch kit after the first year.
I told Beckley in our interview that I’d traveled extensively with my clubs without issue and had to ask the other obvious question: Isn’t this just a solution in search of a problem?
If this works for you, then it works for you.
“You can look at it that way if you want,” he says. “But I think it’s a problem that there’s a solution for. It happens every day. Someone gets their clubs at the airport and finds a broken head or a bent shaft.
“I mean, I was looking for this solution myself and couldn’t find it. So if I’m looking for it, someone else out there is probably looking for it, too.”
Not willing to let this one go, I told Beckley that between a $40 Stiff Arm, a $30 foam cover I found on eBay 10 years ago and taking the heads off my metalwoods, I’m still pretty confident. So why spend $299 on an Ayr Support?
“Everybody has their own way of doing things,” he explains. “Some people still want to use their towels to wrap their club heads. There are a million ways to skin a cat. But Ayr Support keeps the whole bag secure. It won’t move around inside your travel cover as it’s being handled by baggage handlers.”
There’s more than one way to skin a cat.
So, does it work?
Ayr Support comes with a generic mini air pump and several adapters, and Beckley says it’ll inflate in 60 to 90 seconds. That wasn’t my experience, until I realized I didn’t have the right adapter installed in the supplied mini air pump. A quick email exchange with Tyler got me squared away.
My sample did not come with instructions. Fortunately, current versions have a full instruction card which flattens the learning curve considerably.
Ayr Support is easy-peasy to use with a U-shaped zipper bag where the entire front opens. Center zip bags are a different story, however. I later learned from Beckley that the two I use, the Club Glove Traveler and Sun Mountain Glider, are the tightest fits.
All it needed was a little deflating.
I had an impossible time getting the Ayr Support to slide all the way to the bottom of the Club Glove. Once I did squeeze it and my stand bag, however, there was no way I could zip the travel cover up. It was easier to get the Ayr Support into the Sun Mountain Glider, but again, zipping it up was impossible.
The best approach with a center-zip bag may be to let air out of the Ayr Support as you work it into the travel cover before putting your golf bag in. Beckley suggests overlapping the flats rather than using the provided Velcro enclosures. Once that’s done, you can add or remove air as needed as you close the travel cover’s zipper.
The first few times you use it will include some trial and error, but once you have the process figured out, it’s not that difficult.
Ayr Support does fit in both the Club Glove and Sun Mountain Glider – just needs a little deflating in the process.
The Ayr Support verdict? It works…
The Ayr Support does what it advertises. Even slightly deflated, it provides more than enough protection for your tools of the trade. Not a blessed thing in that travel cover is going to move.
Our verdict? If you have one of those U-shaped zipper bags and travel with your clubs regularly, we can highly recommend Ayr Support. It’s a borderline no-brainer.
If, however, you have a center-zip bag, we can also recommend it, it’s just not as straightforward to use. If you lack patience and tend toward making snap judgments, you’ll likely get frustrated early. There’s a learning curve involved that requires some trial and error, especially with more compact travel covers like the Club Glove Traveler. That said, Ayr Support will do what it says it will do.
Is the additional peace of mind when traveling with your clubs worth a $299 add-on? That’s for you to decide. We can say that the Ayr Support unit itself is pretty beefy and definitely light years more substantial than a pool float. Popping a leak is always a concern, but as long as you don’t juggle knives while sitting on it, the chances appear to be remote.
As mentioned, I’ve been lucky in my traveling life with hundreds of flights without my babies being damaged. Maybe I’ve dodged bullets. Maybe I’m due. There are certainly other ways to protect your clubs for air travel. Ayr Support, once it’s properly installed, offers next-level protection.
And it only takes one bent shaft or a snapped-off club head to make the case.
For more information, visit ayrsupport.com.
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