The Beach Club
at Gurney’s

The Beach Club is the seasonal heart of Gurney’s Montauk Resort and Seawater Spa, spread along roughly 2,000 feet of private Atlantic sand below Old Montauk Highway. In a region where the storied clubs of Southampton and East Hampton admit members and nobody else, this is the venue that actually sells a beach club day to the public: daybeds and lounge sofas by reservation, lunch and cocktails brought to you, and the Sound Waves music series carrying summer weekends into the evening.

We rank it first on the Hamptons club directory for exactly that openness, but openness is not the same as cheapness. Gurney’s publishes no rate card at all, every daybed and cabana is priced by email quote, and this page exists to help you decide, with a clear head, whether the quote you get back is worth it against a coastline where the ocean itself is free.

Strip away the branding and the product is this: a serviced bed on genuinely private ocean sand, food and drink that arrive without you moving, and a crowd that has self selected by being willing to pay for all of it. On summer weekends the Sound Waves sets give the afternoon a festival edge without turning the place into a nightclub, and midweek the same beds sit in something close to silence. If a quote is going to make sense anywhere, it is midweek, when the beach is emptiest and the rates are reported to soften.

Now the arithmetic. A daybed seats four, so whatever figure comes back by email divides by the size of your group, and a number that stings for a couple can turn reasonable for a full bed. Push the other way and the case collapses: one visitor account from 2016 already described a quote of 1,000 dollars for a single peak day, prices have not gone backward since, and four figures buys a lot of lobster rolls at Ditch Plains. Get the quote in writing, divide by your party, and decide with the calculator rather than the brochure.

Where Gurney’s falls short is transparency and the fine print. Publishing no prices means no planning without a correspondence, the chairs on the sand are reserved for hotel guests however much you spend at the bar, and this is the open Atlantic, which serves up proper waves on many days rather than pool calm water. None of that is hidden, but none of it is on the homepage either.

The resort’s stretch runs wide and long below the bluffs of Old Montauk Highway, facing due south into the open Atlantic, and its privacy is real rather than notional, the beds never fight a public crowd for space. The same swell, the same light and the same water carry on east to the village sands and to Ditch Plains, Montauk’s surf beach, where the day costs a parking spot. Our Ditch Plains guide covers the typical conditions and the food trucks that stand in for beach service there.

Gurney’s sits on Old Montauk Highway a few minutes west of Montauk village, about three hours from Manhattan by the Long Island Rail Road or the Hampton Jitney, both of which stop in Montauk, with the resort a short taxi from either. Drivers use the resort’s own parking. Booking is a correspondence rather than a checkout: you email the Beach Club team with your date and party, they answer with availability and pricing, and July and August weekends go earliest.

If writing to a resort reservations desk is not how you want to spend an afternoon, put your date and party size in the form below and we will pass the enquiry along so the club can come back with availability and a firm figure for your day. It costs nothing and it gets you a number you can actually judge.