Tiburón's Driving Range Is About to Host a Golf Tournament and a Country Concert in the Same Week

This December, the same stretch of turf behind the Ritz-Carlton Naples, Tiburón does double duty. From December 7 through 13, the Grant Thornton Invitational brings sixteen mixed PGA Tour and LPGA Tour teams to the Gold Course. Five nights into that week, the resort's driving range turns into a concert lawn for Live Fest, with Riley Green headlining and Tyler Hubbard as special guest. Both events land on the same golf complex within the same seven days, and both arrive just weeks after the clubhouse itself finishes the biggest renovation it has seen in years.

For anyone who already lives inside Tiburón's gates, that stacking matters more than any single event on its own. Here's what's actually changing, and what it means for getting around that week.

What the Clubhouse Renovation Actually Changes

The Ritz-Carlton Naples, Tiburón has been under renovation since May 2026, with the full transformation debuting this fall. Parker Torres Design, the same studio behind the redesign of the sister Ritz-Carlton on the beach, is leading the work on guest rooms, the lobby, and the resort's dining lineup. The resort has stayed fully open through construction rather than closing for the work, which means the changes have been rolling in gradually rather than arriving all at once.

Two new restaurant concepts are set to open in October 2026. Palmera is described as the resort's new heartbeat, a restaurant and grill built around Gulf Coast ingredients like sun-ripened citrus, heirloom tomatoes, and local seafood, with natural light and stone finishes replacing whatever came before it. Café Fenrose is the resort's new all-day market café, meant for a quick coffee before a tee time or a pastry on the way out the door. Alongside the two restaurants, the resort is also debuting Swaying Palm, a new 2,700-square-foot event space with windows framing the golf course, aimed at weddings, corporate retreats, and the kind of milestone gatherings that used to have fewer venue options on property.

Not everything is changing. Ria, the resort's poolside Latin American restaurant, kept serving through construction, with its lunch menu staying outdoors by the pool and dinner temporarily moved to The Preserve through September 2026, which suggests dinner service is due back at Ria itself as the renovation wraps this fall. Sydney's Pub, the clubhouse restaurant that belongs to Tiburón Golf Club rather than the Ritz-Carlton hotel side, hasn't been part of any of this. Chef Jason Pierce's menu of upscale pub food and what regulars call the best grouper sandwich in town has kept running the whole time, untouched by the redesign happening a few hundred yards away.

By the time golf week and Live Fest arrive in December, residents will be looking at a clubhouse that's had its first full season to settle into the new layout.

The Tournament Nobody's Renamed Yet

If you search for what's happening at Tiburón Golf Club this December, you'll likely still see the event referred to as the QBE Shootout. A Yelp business listing for it was updated as recently as June 2026 under that name, and betting-focused golf recap sites were still writing it up under the old branding as late as last fall. That name hasn't described what actually happens on the Gold Course since 2022.

The tournament that plays out at Tiburón this December is the Grant Thornton Invitational, which debuted in 2023 as the direct successor to the QBE Shootout. The format carries over some familiar bones. Three rounds, the first a scramble, the second alternate shot, the third a modified four-ball. But the structure underneath it changed. Instead of twelve all-men's teams, the Grant Thornton fields sixteen two-player teams, each pairing one PGA Tour player with one LPGA Tour player, competing for an equal four million dollar purse split between both tours. It was the first mixed-team event on tour since the JCPenney Classic ended in 1999.

So the tournament Tiburón hosts this December is a different event than the one a lot of secondary golf sites are still describing, running on the same course under a name that stuck around online longer than the sponsorship did.

The Same Ground, Twice

Five days into that tournament week, on Saturday, December 12, the resort's driving range switches jobs. From 5 to 10 p.m., Live Fest sets up outdoors on that same driving range for what its own site bills as Naples' premier music experience, with Riley Green headlining and Tyler Hubbard as special guest. Live Fest sells a Golf + Music Combo ticket that pairs a round of golf earlier in the day with a concert ticket for that evening, which tells you the overlap isn't an accident. The people running the show built the pairing into the ticket structure on purpose, betting that the same guests who spend the day on the fairways will want to spend the evening on the lawn a short walk away.

That means the golf complex behind Tiburón's gates carries two very different national-caliber crowds in the same calendar week this year. A tour event most locals still call by its old name, and a country concert that turns a practice facility into a stage.

Getting In and Parked That Week

For residents who aren't attending either event, the logistics still show up on the roads around the community. Parking for tournament week is split across two lots outside the gates, each active on different days:

• Lot A, valet and handicapped parking only, sits at the corner of Livingston Road and Vanderbilt Beach Road and runs Thursday through Sunday. A parking pass is required, and complimentary shuttles carry guests to the course from there.
• Lot B, general spectator parking, sits next to the Siena Lakes Senior Living Community on Airport-Pulling Road and runs Wednesday and Thursday only. It costs ten dollars cash on arrival, with shuttles included.

Anyone without a car can also reach the club by public bus, with route 12 stopping at Airport-Pulling Road and Vanderbilt Beach Road, about an eight-hundred-meter walk from the venue. For a community built around guarded gates and private fairways, that's a reminder that the traffic and parking overflow from tournament week plays out on the public roads just outside the community, regardless of whether a given household has tickets to anything at all.

By the second week of December, Tiburón's golf complex will have carried a rebranded professional tour event, a country concert on its own driving range, and the first real public look at a clubhouse that spent the second half of 2026 rebuilding itself. Whichever part of that week actually reaches a resident's calendar, it's worth knowing which version of the tournament, and which version of the clubhouse, is actually the one playing out this year.

If you're weighing what a community like Tiburón actually feels like to live in day to day, not just what the listing photos show, Laurie Bellico has been tracking Naples neighborhoods long enough to walk you through it in plain terms.