Racing made the hotel famous, but golf kept it full. From its earliest seasons the property ran a package program that bundled a room, daily green fees, pre-arranged tee times and a welcome cocktail at the grill — from $47 per person, double occupancy, in 1997. This page restores the program as the hotel sold it. (Originally published at /golf.cfm; preserved here at /golf.html.)
The Package
The 1997–98 golf package included:
- A beautiful room with one king or two double beds
- Green fees for one round of golf daily (additional rounds available)
- Welcome cocktails at the hotel's Chicago-style bar & grill
- Complimentary newspaper daily
- Extended check-out available
- Pre-arranged tee times
- Non-golfer and single rates available
Pricing ran $47 per person, double occupancy, May through December, and $65 in the winter high season — with the honest caveat, printed right on the page, that "golf package rates are not available during special events. We will be happy to arrange golf for you; regular rates apply." Even the golf program bowed to the racing calendar.
The Courses
By 2003 the hotel arranged tee times across eleven area courses, a list that doubles as a map of golf along the Fun Coast:
- The LPGA's championship home course — the area's flagship, five miles from the hotel; the women's professional tour is headquartered in Daytona Beach to this day (lpga.com)
- Indigo Lakes Golf and Country Club — the classic local parkland layout
- Turnbull Bay — marsh-side golf in New Smyrna Beach
- River Bend — along the Tomoka River basin
- Matanzas Woods and Cypress Knoll — the Palm Coast pine-corridor courses
- Halifax Plantation — carved through live oaks north of Ormond Beach
- Pelican Bay Country Club — the south Daytona neighborhood club
- Spruce Creek Country Club — beside the famous fly-in community
- Cypress Head — the Port Orange municipal favorite
- Ocean Hammock — the oceanfront headliner added to the program in the 2000s
Why Golfers Booked a Speedway Hotel
The economics were simple: beachside resorts charged resort prices, and the golf was mostly inland anyway. A motor hotel on US 92 put golfers fifteen minutes from half the courses on the list, fed them breakfast at dawn at the on-site grill, and pre-booked their tee times before they arrived — concierge service at roadside rates. Snowbird foursomes returned every winter on exactly this math.
Golf remains one of the region's calling cards; the state tourism office keeps a current guide at VisitFlorida.com. For what the rest of a stay cost in the program's heyday, see the historical rates — and for everything else within five miles of the first tee, the attractions page.
A Golfer's Day, Package Style
The program sold a rhythm as much as a rate. Coffee and breakfast at the grill at first light; tee time pre-arranged, so no phone calls and no starter's lottery; eighteen holes inland where the morning air is still; back up the boulevard by mid-afternoon for the pool, the mall, or a Speedway tram tour; welcome cocktails honored at the bar; and a second round the next day on a different course entirely — the package's quiet genius, since eleven courses meant a week of golf without playing the same hole twice. Non-golfing companions paid their own lower rate and kept the beach, the attractions, and the food court next door.
The package program outlived every redesign of the website — brochure-era HTML, the booking-calendar years, the final renovation-era site — because it solved a permanent problem with permanent elegance: Florida has more golf than any state in the union, and somebody has to make the tee times.