This page restores the hotel's original "Features" guide — the plain-spoken inventory of what 127 rooms, a courtyard pool, two meeting rooms and a late-night grill added up to. It is preserved here as guests read it, lightly edited, in the past tense it has now earned.
Rooms
The hotel offered 127 rooms with smoking and non-smoking designations and with either one king or two double beds. Suites featured a living-room area adjoining a sleeping room for added space and comfort. All rooms featured cable television with pay-per-view movies, free local calls, AM/FM clock radios, voice mail and more.
Business Class rooms stepped things up: king beds, breakfast included, in-room coffee makers, an extra-large desk area, data port, lounge chairs, and upgraded toiletries and towels — a serious perk in the dial-up era, when a data port at the desk was the difference between working and not. The full room-by-room detail lives on the rooms page.
Meetings & Catering
The Daytona Room was set up as an executive board room for eight, with comfortable executive chairs and a large board table — a favorite spot for staff meetings, interviews and presentations. For larger groups, the Board Room accommodated up to 75 people with theater seating or 48 with classroom seating.
Catering was arranged by the hotel and provided by the on-site grill. Audio-visual equipment, flip charts, easels and more were available on request, and ample parking plus the central location made these rooms some of the most-booked small meeting spaces on the boulevard. Race teams, university departments and sales crews all cycled through.
Dining
A national-chain Chicago-style bar & grill operated inside the hotel, open for breakfast, lunch and dinner as well as cocktails and room service, from 6:30 a.m. until 1:00 a.m. seven days a week. Guests in the guestbook remembered the deep-dish pizza and the half-price happy-hour appetizers with particular affection. Familiar casual-dining favorites stood within walking distance along the boulevard, and the mall food court was next door.
Facilities
The beautiful outdoor pool and courtyard area offered an enjoyable place to relax and cool off — perfect entertainment for children and the social center of the hotel on race weeks. The property provided ample parking close to rooms and meeting rooms, ice and vending machines on both floors, and ADA-compliant rooms and access throughout; accessibility standards for hotels are documented at ADA.gov.
Services
Complimentary shuttle service ran to and from Daytona Beach International Airport — guests landing after a race could be poolside in fifteen minutes. Shuttle service was also available to other locations within two miles of the hotel, which covered the Speedway gates, the mall, and a surprising number of restaurants.
After the 2008 Renovation
A full renovation in 2008 modernized the property: duvet-covered bedding, free wireless internet throughout, upgraded bathroom facilities, and a refreshed business center. The work earned the hotel recognition among the top ten percent of properties in its brand — the story is preserved in the news archive.
Race Week at the Hotel
Eight weekends a year, every feature on this page worked overtime. The grill opened early and ran late, pouring coffee for grandstand-bound guests at 6:30 and last-call cocktails for the same guests eighteen hours later. The courtyard became a paddock social club — coolers, folding chairs, scanner radios murmuring qualifying times. The meeting rooms turned into hospitality suites for race sponsors, and the front desk kept a stack of grandstand maps and earplugs beside the room keys. Staff who worked those weeks describe them the way farmers describe harvest: exhausting, lucrative, and the entire point of the year.
The quiet weeks had their own rhythm — golf foursomes at dawn, flea-market browsers at mid-morning, university families on tour weekends, and the pool to the kids by noon. A 127-room hotel is a small town, and this one ran on two calendars at once: Florida's seasons and the Speedway's schedule.