The short answer
The 2026 Presidents Cup is over. The United States beat the Internationals 17-13 at Medinah on Sunday, September 27, after trailing 10½-7½. The next one is December 7-10, 2028, at Kingston Heath in Melbourne. Medinah has no event announced. For any big week there the lodging map holds: Itasca closest, Schaumburg deepest, or downtown on Metra.
What happened at Medinah
The Internationals led 10½-7½ going into Sunday. Then the Americans took 9½ of the 12 singles points and won 17-13, which Sky Sports called the biggest final-day comeback in the event’s history. Jacob Bridgeman, one of Brandt Snedeker’s captain’s picks and a first-timer, won the deciding point 1-up over Min Woo Lee after being one down with three holes left. That makes 11 straight for the United States. The Internationals’ only win is still 1998, with a tie in 2003.
Snedeker’s line afterward, per Sky: “Medinah has a history of funny things happening.” The last team event on Course No. 3 was the 2012 Ryder Cup, where Europe came from 10-6 down on Sunday to win 14½-13½. Medinah has also hosted three U.S. Opens and two PGA Championships.
This was the 16th Presidents Cup. The club played the course in a different order for the week. Rounds started on what members know as the fifth hole and finished on the usual 1 through 4, which moved the holes around Lake Kadijah earlier in the round, and most match-play matches end before the 18th.
On crowds, organizers had planned for about 35,000 fans on each of the four competition days and roughly 150,000 across all six, according to Golf Monthly on September 27. We checked again on October 28, a month on, and there is still no official attendance figure. The reporting since the Cup has kept using the same planning numbers, which is the tell that nobody has released a real one.
This page was a booking guide for that week. It is now the record of how the week was set up, plus the parts that stay useful for the next person who has to find a bed near Medinah.
The venue is in a town with no hotel row
Medinah, Illinois is an unincorporated community in DuPage County, about 25 miles northwest of downtown Chicago, bordered by Itasca, Roselle and Bloomingdale. The club sits on Medinah Road. Around it are houses and a Metra station. There is no hotel district and nothing resembling a strip of towers at the gate.
HotelGuides, which ranks properties by distance from the club, lists none in Medinah itself and says the closest are 1 to 2 miles north in Itasca or south in Addison. So every fan at a Medinah event is commuting in from somewhere. The tournament’s own transportation plan showed where the demand landed, because it named the towns: parking in Itasca, Glen Ellyn and Schaumburg, rideshare in Itasca, and a train station in Medinah proper.
Where to stay near Medinah, suburb by suburb
Itasca: closest and smallest. Eaglewood Resort & Spa on Nordic Road was the official rideshare drop-off, a walk from the East Entrance, and HotelGuides has it 0.7 miles from the club. That is the nearest thing a Medinah event has to a walk-to-the-gates hotel. The Westin Chicago Northwest on Park Boulevard and the Hyatt Place Chicago/Itasca on Arlington Heights Road are in Itasca’s office corridor, listed at 2.0 and 2.7 miles. It is a handful of properties. In a market that thin, revenue managers, the people who set hotel rates, typically fence a big week early: minimum stays across the event nights, discounted rate plans closed out, and rates stepped up as pickup pace, the speed rooms are selling, shows the house filling. If Itasca only offers a multi-night minimum you don’t want, that is your cue to move out a ring.
Addison: the other close option. The same distance list has a Hampton Inn & Suites 1.6 miles from the club and a Hilton Garden Inn at 3.3, both in Addison, south of the course. This suburb was not in the tournament’s transportation plan, so there was no lot or shuttle from here.
Schaumburg: where the rooms are. The Red Lot was on Martingale Road in Schaumburg, in the office-and-mall district around Woodfield Mall. Hotels here run from limited-service chains to a 468-room Hyatt Regency. Groups who want a late dinner that isn’t a hotel bar do best here.
Glen Ellyn and the I-355 corridor. The Green Lot was at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, south of the course. A sensible base if you’re driving in every day anyway. Pace routes 714 and 715 reach the college on weekdays only.
The O’Hare corridor: fly-in default. Itasca is about 12 miles and 20 minutes from O’Hare in normal traffic, and the airport hotels around Rosemont are a big cluster built for air travelers. Land, sleep, drive west, park at your reserved lot.
Downtown Chicago: the sleeper play. Metra’s Milwaukee District West line runs from Union Station to a stop called Medinah, 23 miles out. For the Presidents Cup a free shuttle covered the last leg to the West Entrance. It is a real commute, a 23-mile train ride with the trip to Union Station on one end and the shuttle on the other. What it buys is the lake, the restaurants, and a hotel market far bigger than any suburb’s.
Vacation rentals: the group play. Medinah, Bloomingdale, Roselle and Itasca fit the profile where a rental beats a hotel. Residential streets close to the course, thin hotel supply, and a multi-night stay that spreads the cleaning fee. A house for a foursome is likely the only lodging category that puts you inside Medinah itself. Rental cancellation terms are usually stiffer than a refundable hotel rate, so read the policy line before the group’s deposit goes in, and check both Vrbo and Airbnb. For a solo or duo trip that might change, hold the refundable hotel room.
How getting in worked
Parking was advance-only. Three general lots ran Tuesday through Sunday: Black (225 Windsor Ave., Itasca), Green (425 Fawell Blvd., Glen Ellyn) and Red (251 N. Martingale Rd., Schaumburg). Passes started at $17 plus taxes and fees. Shuttles took 10 to 20 minutes to the West Entrance. Nothing was sold at the lots.
Rideshare had one door. Drop-off and pick-up was at Eaglewood Resort & Spa, 1401 Nordic Road. One location, in a residential suburb, for a crowd planned at 35,000 a day.
The train was the cleanest route. Union Station, Milwaukee District West toward Elgin, off at Medinah, free shuttle to the gates. Metra added two outbound morning trains and two inbound evening trains on the weekdays and several extra trains on the weekend, some running express between Medinah and Western Avenue. All of that was tournament service and it ended with the tournament. Fares are the durable part. Metra’s Saturday or Sunday day pass is $7 and the weekend pass is $10 in the Ventra app; weekday passes are priced by zone.
General parking in 2026 was three remote lots in three suburbs, each with its own shuttle. The hotel that made sense was the one on the same side of the map as your lot or your train line.
What tickets did
Tickets went on sale in September 2025 at $50 for the practice days, $100 for Thursday and up to $155 for Sunday, before taxes and fees.
This page’s last ticket check was the morning of Tuesday, September 22, the first practice day. Those numbers are a record of that morning and were not re-checked afterward:
| Day | Lowest all-in resale, TickPick, Sept. 22 |
|---|---|
| Tuesday practice | $31 |
| Wednesday practice | $28 |
| Thursday | $79 |
| Friday | $116 |
| Saturday | $156 |
| Sunday | $136 |
On the same morning the tournament’s own page still listed general admission for all six days, and the International Club hospitality venue was sold out Thursday through Saturday. So on day one of tournament week, the practice days were under their $50 launch price and Thursday was under its $100. Saturday, the two-session day, was the one the resale market wanted most. There is no final-weekend number here because none was logged.
Chicago’s October, restated October 28
The golf was the front end of a crowded stretch, and as of Wednesday, October 28 the whole stretch has been played. Here is how it ran.
Played: the Wild Card round, and it split the city. The Cubs finished 89-73 as the National League’s 5 seed, went to San Diego, and lost both games, 8-0 and 4-1. The White Sox finished 84-78 as the American League’s 6 seed, went to Houston, and swept, 6-3 and 7-3. So the Wrigley Field guide is a next-season read now and the South Side is the side still playing. The playoff hub has the rest of the bracket.
Played: the new Ryan Field opened. Northwestern beat Penn State 34-13 in Evanston on Friday, October 2, the first game in its $862 million, 35,000-seat stadium, 100 years to the day after the original building hosted its first.
Played, Sunday, October 4: Bears-Jets, noon at Soldier Field. APTA’s TRANSform Conference & EXPO opened at McCormick Place the same day and ran through October 7, with about 12,000 attendees and more than 800 exhibitors per Metro Magazine. The expo listed the Hilton Chicago alongside McCormick Place as a venue, so that load landed on downtown rooms and not only on the lakefront campus. The fall convention-collisions piece has the method for checking any city’s calendar before you book.
Played, October 7 and 8: playoff baseball at Rate Field. The White Sox hosted Cleveland in Games 3 and 4 of the Division Series and lost both, 9-3 on the Wednesday afternoon and 9-5 on the Thursday night. That tied the series 2-2, and Cleveland won Game 5 at home 2-0 on Saturday, October 10, so the White Sox are out and Chicago has no October baseball left. The Rate Field guide has the South Side call.
Run, Sunday, October 11: the Chicago Marathon. More than 55,000 registered runners, the largest field in the race’s history, first start at 7:20 a.m. in Grant Park. It was also NLCS Game 1, and with the Cubs out that game could not be in Chicago; the Brewers and Dodgers both closed out on the Wednesday night, so the opener was in Milwaukee. The Bears were at Green Bay that afternoon too, kickoff moved up to noon Central on September 29, so race weekend had no home game at either ballpark or at Soldier Field. The Chicago Marathon hotel guide covers that weekend on its own.
Nothing on that list is left to plan around. The pattern is the useful part for next time: whatever follows a Medinah major lands on the city’s calendar, not the suburbs’, so the suburbs stay the easier place to extend a golf trip.
What’s next
The Presidents Cup goes to Kingston Heath Golf Club in Melbourne, December 7-10, 2028. The tournament’s site is registering fans for first access to tickets, with premium experiences and hospitality due in February 2028. General ticket dates are not published yet. After that it returns to the United States at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis in 2030.
Medinah has nothing on the calendar, and nothing has been announced in the month since the Cup ended; we searched again on October 28. Front Office Sports reported on September 22 that the club was in talks over a tournament that has not been announced, with club president David Latham pointing at major women’s, collegiate and amateur events. The same report says the membership funded a $23 million renovation finished in 2024 and has invested well north of $100 million since the 2012 Ryder Cup. The club wants to host again. It has not said what or when.
The booking play for the next Medinah event
Whenever the next one is announced, start from how 2026 ran.
Decide your inbound route before you pick a hotel. Train means downtown or anywhere on the Milwaukee District West line. Car means a reserved remote lot, and a hotel on that lot’s side of the course.
Book refundable the day the dates are confirmed. Itasca is only a few properties, so look there first. The mechanics of holding two refundable options and keeping the better one are in the refundable-rate playbook, and the cutoff fine print that catches people is in the free-cancellation guide.
Buy the parking pass in the same sitting as the room. In 2026 the lots were advance-only and nothing was sold on site.
Groups of four or more should price a house in Roselle, Bloomingdale or Itasca against two hotel rooms, and read the rental’s cancellation terms first.
