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.
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
The LPGA International Course Story
The LPGA's account of its Daytona Beach home gives the courses a place in women's golf history. The Jones course, designed by Rees Jones, opened in July 1994 as the first course designed specifically for professional women golfers. The Arthur Hills course followed in October 1998. Both are 18-hole layouts.
The organization remains headquartered in Daytona Beach. Its account also describes a teaching academy with three championship practice holes, five putting greens, chipping greens, practice bunkers and a 360-yard double-ended driving range. The complex combines full rounds with dedicated places to work on individual parts of the game.
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.