This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Travelers Championship, which is a notable milestone, especially in today’s era of professional golf. Previously known as the Buick Championship — and in its earliest years during the 1980s, the Greater Hartford Open — the tournament has not only survived but thrived over two decades.
Its success is largely due to the fact that tournament director Nathan Grube and Andy Bessette, executive vice president and chief administrative officer at Travelers Insurance, have been willing to make notable changes every step of the journey.
“From day one, we adopted the saying, ‘Never accept the status quo,’” Bessette says. “The moment you accept the status quo, you start going in the opposite direction.”
In the beginning, challenging the tournament’s status quo was relatively easy. In an attempt to better understand the Travelers’ shortcomings, Grube and Bessette attended other tournaments on the PGA Tour schedule, hoping to get some one-on-one time with players. They wanted to hear what the PGA Tour’s best had to say about the event and how it could improve. Most players were deferential to start, but Grube and Bessette pressed, urging them to share candid observations and opinions. Soon, they had their first marching orders.
During the mid-2000s, the most pressing needs related to the host club, TPC River Highlands. The clubhouse had been around for some time, which meant it sufficed 51 weeks out of the year. But for that one week in June when the PGA Tour arrived, the “quaint” building — in the words of the players — was ill-equipped to comfortably and effectively accommodate that many people. The driving range, like the clubhouse, also reflected an outdated era.
“The joke was that when the tournament first moved here, John Daly was the only guy who could hit it out of the range,” Grube says. “And after a few years, Corey Pavin was the only guy who couldn’t hit it out of the range.”
Fortunately, TPC River Highlands was, and still is, owned and operated by the PGA Tour, so getting the approval to make wide-sweeping changes to the facilities was relatively easy. Grube also acknowledges that the title sponsor’s overall approach to hosting a successful tournament each year was a blessing.
“They approached it more like they would their traditional business,” he says, “targeting who the key customers are and answering the question, ‘What does each of those different customers want the event to be?’” The customers in this scenario fell into several categories: tour players, their families, their support teams — including trainers and physiologists — caddies, spectators, volunteers, and the media.
The players were accounted for as improvements to clubhouse dining, practice facilities, and strategic modifications to the golf course were made over the years. But they were also indirectly served as Grube and Bessette introduced other amenities and services that improved the tournament experience for members of their teams. Dedicated facilities for physical therapists and physiologists soon came online. Then the tournament began offering laundry services for caddies and providing them with easy, grab-and-go food options. Only a couple of years ago, the tournament went so far as to curate a fleet of complimentary vehicles that the full-time loopers could use for the week.
“We try to pay really close attention to a player’s entire ecosystem and take care of all of those different people the best way that we can,” Grube says.
When it comes to the players’ families, the Travelers has them covered, too. Dedicated day-care programs are available throughout the week, with a variety of activities and amenities included—the tournament’s executive committee jokes that they’ve created Camp Travelers. The tournament even builds a mini-Fenway Park each year for the kids, where Wiffle ball games complete with jerseys and umpires are enthusiastically played.
“My kids talk about it all year long,” Keegan Bradley says of that Wiffle ball field and the games that are played on it. “So, if there was ever a time where I said to my kids, ‘We’re not going to Hartford this year,’ they’d be pissed.”
As a two-time winner at TPC River Highlands, Bradley certainly has a soft spot for the tournament. But he’s become a major ambassador and spokesman for the event — and not just because he’s a native New Englander, either.
“Back in the day, I was always so proud to convince players to come play here,” he says. “I remember that I convinced Luke Donald to come play Travelers. I told him it’s so fun. And after the week was done, he said it was one of the best weeks he’s ever had at a tournament.”
However, the Travelers doesn’t solely rely on favorable word-of-mouth marketing to lure players each season. Every year, a commercial jet is chartered to bring more than 100 people directly to Hartford from the U.S. Open, wherever the major championship happens to be played. “Making it easy for the players and their families, and then making it feel like a home game for them is absolutely what we try to do,” Grube says.
You could easily argue that Grube and Bessette have taken such a proactive approach out of necessity. The tournament’s spot on the calendar — the week immediately following the U.S. Open — doesn’t lend itself to being a can’t-miss event on the PGA Tour schedule. But if you were to take that stance, it must also come with the acknowledgment that the Travelers likely earned its more recent signature event status for being a tournament that so many players over the years have learned to love and look forward to.
Another example of building for the future is the tournament's eye for up-and-comers. Each year, a sponsor exemption goes to a deserving player on the rise. This year, an exemption went to Ben James, a Milford, Connecticut, native who played collegiately at the University of Virginia and earned his PGA Tour membership as the No. 1 player from the 2026 PGA Tour University Ranking. Other sponsor exemptions through the years have gone to Webb Simpson (2008), Justin Thomas (2013), Jon Rahm (2015), Wyndham Clark (2017), Collin Morikawa and Viktor Hovland (2019), Chris Gotterup (2022) and Ludvig Aberg (2023).
As Grube reveals, being the tournament director — or just being a member of the tournament committee — is a full-time job, one that hinges on always looking for ways to improve the event experience for everyone involved. Some years, those projects are exciting and produce flashy new features, such as the giant high-resolution videoboard by the range that allows spectators to see, in real time, shot-tracer stats for balls that are hit by some of the game’s most popular players. Other times, like this year, it involves Grube and Bessette driving through the various parking areas, looking at ways to improve traffic flow or places where they could build temporary structures for equipment storage.
It doesn’t always produce needle-moving amenities or fan experiences, but the never-ending work that Grube, Bessette, and their team continuously invest in the tournament is the element that has kept the event relevant for 20 years. Fortunately, the championship’s most important category of customers recognizes that, too. “The Travelers,” says Bradley, “is a model of how to take a tournament that wasn’t necessarily a premier event on tour and turn it into what it is today.”
