Updated 17 October 2026. DSRT Surf is selling public surf sessions. Its booking calendar is open to anyone, with no account needed to browse it, and it lists Bay and Reef sessions through the day, each with a live count of spots left.
DSRT opened its calendar to the public on 24 September, the OC Register reported, and a Mercury News story, republished by Hotel Online on 28 September, said it is in a soft-opening phase and expects to open fully in November. For now the property is limited to 150 people at a time, The Inertia reported, against as many as 700 surfers a day once it is fully open. Its own FAQ still answers the question "When will DSRT Surf be open to the public?" with "Late summer 2026". Our park page lists it as open, because sessions can be booked today.
California's desert now has two public wave pools a short drive apart, and the Coachella Valley makes a strong case for a surf trip.
The wave is the headline
DSRT Surf runs a 52-module Wavegarden Cove across a 5.5-acre lagoon. It is the second open Cove in the United States, after Atlantic Park in Virginia Beach. At full tilt the machine can push out up to 1,000 waves an hour across multiple zones running at the same time: soft rollers in a dedicated beginner area, open walls for carving, and steeper settings with barrel and air sections on the performance end.
For a sense of the ceiling, the same Cove platform runs the performance settings at Alaia Bay and URBNSURF Melbourne.
What is actually open at launch
Set your expectations correctly: this is a phase one opening. The lagoon and the leisure pool are the show. The 139-key hotel and the 57 private villas are a second phase, so a full surf-and-stay trip on the property is not a launch-day option. The park sits inside the Desert Willow Golf Resort, about 25 minutes from Palm Springs International Airport, so rooms nearby are easy even if rooms on site are not.
Reef sessions run an hour. If other Cove openings are any guide, the first weeks of bookings will vanish fast.
What it will cost
Read from the booking calendar on 17 October 2026, for sessions from 18 October, DSRT sells two kinds of session in its one lagoon, which is split into a left and a right side, and prices them very differently.
Bay sessions are the beginner product and the cheap way in. Bay and Play is $60 and Learn to Surf is $100, or $60 on the local rate. Bay prices were the same on every day checked. Bay and Play runs an hour and Learn to Surf ninety minutes, and only three Bay and Play sessions run a day, so they are the constraint rather than the Reef.
Reef sessions are the performance product, sold by the hour and priced by what the wave is set to do, and most cost more at weekends. Where the price differed between the weekdays and the weekend days checked, the range shows both:
- Malibu Beginner $130 to $140
- Malibu Plus $150 to $160
- Expert Turns $180 to $210
- Pro Turns $190 to $220
- Advanced Turns $200 to $230
- Pro Barrels $200
- Malibu Turbo $210 to $240
- Expert Barrels $220 to $240
- Turns to Barrel $230 to $250
- Air Camp $320
Two things to know before you read too much into that list. The prices move from slot to slot and day to day, and the whole lineup has been renamed before, so treat these as a dated reading rather than a rate card. And the booking system tags all three Malibu sessions as beginner sessions, including Malibu Turbo at up to $240, so book by the session name and the price rather than the tag.
Surfing a desert park in September
It is opening in the desert at the tail of summer. Midsummer afternoons in Palm Desert are fiercely hot, and there is no version of surfing in the middle of the day that sounds fun in that. Book the earliest sessions you can, drink more water than you think you need, and treat the leisure pool as recovery, not decoration. The upside of the desert deal is the other nine months, when the coast is blown out or flat and Palm Desert is mild, with a machine making perfect waves on schedule.
This is now a two-park region. Palm Springs Surf Club is a short drive away with its SurfLoch pool, so a weekend can take in two different wave technologies; our DSRT vs Palm Springs Surf Club comparison sets them side by side. If you were on the fence about a desert surf trip, the fence just got a lot smaller. For the full picture of what California offers now, our California surf park guide covers the whole map.
Photo courtesy of DSRT Surf, via Wavegarden.
