Daytona Lagoon offers mini-golf alongside many other activities, but the neglected course could greatly benefit from some love.
“Play it where it lies!”
A staple of Daytona Beach tourism, Daytona Lagoon is first and foremost the area’s premiere water park. Stacked with an arcade, indoors ropes course, laser tag arena, bumper cars, go-karts, and mini-golf course, the attraction can keep families engaged all day for fairly reasonable prices. Daytona Lagoon is largely seasonal, seeing most of their visitors in spring and summer as the water park is the main attraction. As a result, a winter visit is a double-edged sword for mini-golfers: the crowd is significantly smaller, but so is the staff maintaining the course.
Daytona Lagoon’s 18 holes are split into two 9-hole segments, a cool way to divide golfing groups and give a break at the halfway point.
Ryan’s Review
This course is in need of some serious love; not in the major design overhaul kind of way, but a more day-to-day kind of way. There was trash scattered throughout the holes, blowing around in the wind, which is easy enough to solve if anyone is paying attention. The final hole, a standard bye-bye-ball tube, was backed up to the point of overflowing with previous golfers’ balls. We had to use a trash cup to flush out a ball tunnel after we lost two of our three balls to it. For an amusement park with staff on-hand, it’s a bit shocking that no one gives the course the time of day.
Balls flushed from the pipe, ready to go into a hole filled with gnarly water
That said, a cleaned-up version of this course would probably fall around average. There isn’t much in the way of hole diversity, although there are a couple of neat uses of water features and diverging paths. I enjoyed the design choice to split the course into two 9-hole areas. It gave you the midpoint feeling of a standard golf course. While there is a lot going on around you (waterslides, go-karts, etc.), it feels fair since the price is notably lower than other courses. That’s the tradeoff of playing amusement park mini-golf I suppose.
Overall Rating: 2/5 golf balls
Carson’s Review
The course’s greens were a little weird because sometimes they made you faster and sometimes made you slower. The bridge and waterfall holes were kind of cool, but that is basically the only good part. It was annoying that they didn't tell us what the pars were. There was trash everywhere, too. I could tell that it’s poorly maintained because we hit our balls into a tunnel and there was a stick blocking the way, but we grabbed a styrofoam cup off of a nearby hole, got some river water in it, and washed it down the tunnel. When we did that, 8 or 9 balls came out of the tunnel, including ours.
Overall: 2/5 golf balls
A classic downhill 18th