Like many of you, I love to travel 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 slide down the conveyor belt, it feels a little like the day I dropped my second son off for his first day of kindergarten. His older sister survived just fine, but I was still a little worried.
We’ve all seen those social media videos of golf bags being abused on the fairway. However, in all my years of traveling golf, I have never had a club damaged. This could mean that I am worried about nothing or it could just mean that my number is going to come up.
This is the thin slice of existence between doubt and fear Support Ayr exists.
Ayr Support is the work of a gentleman named Tyler Beckley and won the Best New Product award at this year’s PGA Show. It’s an inflatable pillow that goes in your travel bag to give your carbon steel and titanium babies a nice layer of protection while they nestle in the belly of a flying giant.
It’s a product that in my mind, anyway, raises many, many questions. We will try to answer as much as we can.
What is Ayr Support?
There’s a reason, dear reader, why airlines make you sign a damage waiver if you don’t use a hard case when traveling with 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 other than that.”
There’s also plenty of open space in a travel bag, even after you’ve loaded up shoes, extra towels, and anything else you can fit in there. And open space means things can move.
And if things can move, things can break.
“If we can keep your bag from rolling or swinging, it will prevent movement and prevent things from breaking.”
Beckley travels more than most people. He is a technical director in the world of broadcast sports. He has worked on 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 full look around work in one trip. We did Saudi Arabia and Australia in consecutive weeks, with a few days for golf in Thailand.”
His journey to Support Ayr 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.
“I got tired of using towels or clothes or other things that just didn’t help much. There has to be a better way, right?”
The light bulb moment came when he tried a pool float he bought on Amazon.
The birth of an inflated 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 think.
“I found a manufacturer that had a material that we thought would be pretty durable. I took it with me on every trip and inflated and deflated it at least once a day to see if it would rise.”
Turns out it didn’t.
“My supplier told me there was another material, a TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane) that was much more durable but much more expensive. I told him we couldn’t do it with what we were using before, so he made one and sent it to me.”
He did the trick. Beckley has been using that prototype himself for nearly a year with nearly 100,000 air miles on it without a single problem.
“As part of the demonstration, I’m going to step on my bag, throw 40-pound dumbbells on it. On Instagram, I threw a 50-pound tank on Support Ayr. The tank turned three meters away, but my sticks were not touched at all.”
With all that said, I know you have questions. Let’s start with the biggie.
What happens if/when it occurs?
That’s the obvious question, isn’t it?
“Potholes and things like that are always a possibility,” Beckley says. “We thought about it, so we have one one year warranty, no questions asked. We are so confident in the material.”
The only thing the warranty does not cover is intentional damage with a knife or something similar.
“We won’t send a patch pack with it. If a leak appears, get back to me.”
We can say that the Ayr Support is quite strong and seems quite durable. Beckley says it will likely offer a patch kit after the first year.
I told Beckley in our interview that I had traveled extensively with my clubs without issue, and had to ask the next obvious question: Isn’t this just a solution looking for a problem?
“You can look at it that way if you want,” he says. “But I think it’s a problem that has a solution. It happens every day. Someone picks up their clubs at the airport and finds a broken head or a bent shaft.
“I mean, I was looking for this solution myself and I couldn’t find it. So if I’m looking for it, someone else out there is probably looking for it too.”
Not wanting to let this one go, I told Beckley that between a $40 rigid arm, a $30 foam cover I found on eBay 10 years ago, and getting my head off my metal wood, I’m still pretty confident. So why spend $299 on an Ayr prop?
“Everyone has their own way of doing things,” he explains. “Some people still like to use their towels to wrap club heads. There’s a million ways to skin a cat. But Support Ayr keeps the whole bag safe. It will not move inside your travel hatch as it is being handled by baggage handlers.”
So does it work?
The Ayr Support comes with a generic mini air pump and some adapters, and Beckley says it will inflate in 60 to 90 seconds. That wasn’t my experience, until I realized I didn’t have the correct adapter installed on the supplied mini air pump. A quick email exchange with Tyler got me off the hook.
My sample did not come with instructions. Fortunately, current versions have a comprehensive instruction card that flattens the learning curve considerably.
Support Ayr it is easy to use with a U-shaped zipper bag where the entire front opens. However, center zip bags are a different story. I later learned from Beckley that the two I use, the Club Glove Traveler and the Sun Mountain Glider, are the tightest fits.
I found it impossible for the Ayr support to slide all the way down the Club Grip. However, once I squeezed it and my bag in, there was no way I could zip up the travel cover. It was easier to get the Ayr Support into the Sun Mountain Glider, but again, closing it was impossible.
The best approach with a center chain bag might be to let the air out of the Ayr prop while working it into the travel cap before putting your golf bag on. Beckley suggests overlapping the flats instead of using the provided Velcro closures. Once this is done, you can add or remove air as needed while zipping up the travel hood.
The first few times you use it will involve some trial and error, but once you get the hang of the process, it’s not that difficult.
Ayr Support’s decision? It works…
of Support Ayr 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 will move.
Our verdict? If you have one of those U-zipper bags and regularly travel with your clubs, we can highly recommend the Ayr Support. It’s a mindless limit.
However, if you have a center zip bag, we can also recommend that, it’s just not as easy to use. If you lack patience and tend to make snap judgments, you are likely to get frustrated early on. There is a learning curve involved that requires some trial and error, especially with more compact travel covers like the Club Glove Traveler. That said, Support Ayr it will do what it says it will do.
Is the extra peace of mind when riding your clubs worth an extra $299? That is for you to decide. We can say that the Ayr Support unit itself is quite sharp and definitely light years more substantial than a pool float. A leak is always a concern, but as long as you don’t juggle while sitting on it, the chances seem remote.
As mentioned, I have been lucky in my travel life with hundreds of flights without my babies being harmed. Maybe I dodged bullets. Maybe I should. Of course there are other ways to protect your clubs for air travel. Ayr backing, once properly installed, provides next-level protection.
And all it takes is a bent shaft or a broken snap head to create the box.
For more information, visit ayrsupport.com.
