The Lodge Is the Key: How Staying at Bay Hill Unlocks a Private Club

November 14, 2026 Claire Donovan

There is no public tee time at Bay Hill. Play is for members and registered lodge guests only — which makes the 69-room Lodge the most consequential small hotel in Florida golf.

3 minute read

Here is the fact that organizes everything about visiting Bay Hill: Arnold Palmer’s Bay Hill Club & Lodge is a private club, and there is no public tee time, no walk-up green fee and no member-for-a-day scheme sold at the gate. Play on its 27 holes is limited to members and registered lodge guests. That single rule makes the Lodge — a 69-room lodge with six guest cottages at 9000 Bay Hill Boulevard — the most consequential small hotel in Florida golf: it is the one honest door into a course the whole sport watches every March. This guide explains how that door works, and what a stay actually includes.

The stay is the membership

The club’s model is old-fashioned and, once understood, elegant: when you stay at the Lodge, you are treated as a member for the duration. Lodge guests share the membership’s privileges — the golf courses and practice facilities, the dining rooms and lounges, the heated junior Olympic-size pool, the fitness center, tennis courts, spa and salon, and the marina on the Butler Chain. The Lodge itself is deliberately un-resort-like in scale: low-slung, compact, decorated from the Arnold Palmer collection, with the clubhouse life of the place flowing through it. Palmer, who owned the club from 1975 until his death in 2016 and made it his winter home, ran it as a club that accepted guests rather than a resort that tolerated members, and his family — the club remains in Palmer family hands — has kept that order of priorities.

The golf you are booking into

The championship 18, the Champion and Challenger nines designed by Dick Wilson in 1961, is the course that hosts the Arnold Palmer Invitational: par 72, past 7,300 yards from the back, with the par-5 sixth bending around its lake and the closing stretch of 16, 17 and 18 played over and around water to the famous banana-shaped final green. The third nine, the Charger — built by Bob Simmons after Wilson’s death — gives the property its 27 holes and gives a two-day stay its variety. Palmer revised his course repeatedly across his ownership, including rebuilding every green in 2009, so what you play is a Wilson routing with a Palmer finish. Our hole-by-hole reading of the championship course prepares you for the shots that matter, and our spectator guide covers the same holes from outside the ropes.

How to book it well

Three disciplines govern a good Bay Hill stay. First, plan around the tournament: the club’s year peaks with the Invitational each March — our tournament week guide explains the shape of that week — and Lodge availability around it is the tightest of the year. Second, book the golf with the room, not after it: the stay-and-play structure is the product, and guests who treat the tee time as an afterthought misunderstand what they bought. Third, use the whole club. The marina puts you on the Butler Chain — the lake system our lake-life guide describes — the tennis and pool fill the non-golf hours honestly, and the clubhouse dining is part of the record of the place, not an amenity checkbox.

Set expectations by the right comparison. This is not a mega-resort with a golf course attached; it is the No. 1 course in the magazine’s Orlando golf rankings — read its winner feature — with a small lodge attached, and the lodge exists to let a limited number of guests inside a private club without changing what the club is. Find it on the Orlando Top Spots Map. Booked on those terms, a Bay Hill stay is what Palmer seems to have intended: you are not a customer at a famous course. You are a guest in his club, and the golf is the house tour.

Filed under Arnold Palmer · Bay Hill · Bay Hill Lodge · Orlando golf · Stay and Play

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