What to pack for a padel holiday

The short version: bring your own racket and a fresh tube of balls, and pack shoes for the surface rather than for the gym. The longer version explains why the first of those is not obvious.

Key figures

What	Count	Out of
Racket hire confirmed	185	189 where any answer is recorded
No record either way	1,676	1,865 properties

Assume no hire unless the property’s own page says otherwise: we hold an answer for roughly one property in ten.

Assume you cannot hire a racket

We have a confirmed “yes, rackets can be hired” for 185 properties out of 1,865, and any recorded value at all for only 189. So the honest reading is not “hire is rare” — it is that almost nobody publishes the answer, which amounts to the same thing when you are standing at reception on a Sunday.

Where hire does exist it is usually two or three club rackets in a cupboard, heavy, and strung for durability rather than for you. Fine for a one-off game. Not what you want for four days.

A racket, a grip and a tube of balls is about 400g of luggage. Bring them.

Balls, and what heat and altitude do to them

Padel balls are slightly lower-pressure than tennis balls and they go dead faster in play. Two things travellers underestimate:

• Heat. A tube left in a hot car or on a sunny terrace goes lively and then flat. Keep them in the room.
• Altitude. Above roughly 500 m the ball flies noticeably longer. Some brands sell a low-pressure ball for altitude; if you are playing somewhere mountainous and the ball feels unmanageable, that is why, and it is not your technique.

Bring a fresh tube even if the hotel sells them, because the hotel that sells them keeps the same box behind the desk for two summers.

Shoes are the item people get wrong

Padel is played almost entirely on artificial grass with sand infill. What you want is a clay-court or padel-specific outsole — a herringbone or omni pattern that lets the foot slide a controlled few centimetres and then stop.

• Running shoes are the common mistake: the sole grips completely, the foot stops dead, and the knee takes it.
• Indoor-court shoes (squash, volleyball) are the second mistake, for the same reason on a different surface.
• A worn-smooth pair of anything is the third: on sand infill, no tread means no braking.

If you own one pair of sports shoes and they are runners, this is the thing worth buying before the trip.

The rest

• An overgrip or two. In heat a grip is finished in a couple of sessions, and hotels do not sell them.
• Sun protection for the eyes. Padel involves looking up at a lobbed ball far more than tennis does. A cap earns its space.
• Long sleeves or a light layer if you are travelling in the shoulder season — see indoor and outdoor courts for why the evenings catch people out.
• Tape or a small strap if you have a history with elbows or knees. Padel’s short, sharp movements find old injuries quickly, and hotel gyms do not stock physio supplies.

What to sort out before you leave, not after

Packing is the easy half. The part that decides whether you actually get to play is booking a court slot, and that is a question of how many courts the hotel has and who else is using them — how to judge a hotel’s padel setup covers what to ask, and why 83% of the hotels in this directory having one or two courts is the number that matters.