How Many Indoor Golf Venues in Canada Are Actually Open 24/7?

"Open late" is the most over-claimed phrase in indoor golf. So we counted.

Over the past few weeks we checked 160 indoor golf venues across Ontario, Alberta and Manitoba — ours and everyone else's — against each venue's own website. Not directory listings, not Google's opening hours, which go stale: the venue's own published hours. The whole list, with addresses and simulator brands, is at indoor golf in Canada.

Here is what the hours field actually says.

65 of 160 are open 24 hours

That is 41%. It is a higher number than we expected, and it is the single biggest change in indoor golf in the last few years: unstaffed, app-access facilities have made round-the-clock hours cheap to offer.

The distribution is lopsided, though:

| Province | Venues | Open 24/7 | | --- | --- | --- | | Ontario | 112 | 59 | | Alberta | 33 | 5 | | Manitoba | 15 | 1 |

Greater Toronto has the deepest overnight market in the country by a wide margin. Mississauga alone has nine venues open around the clock. Calgary, with 28 venues, has five.

A further 17 venues do not publish hours at all, which in practice means phoning or guessing.

"Open 24/7" and "open at 3am" are not the same claim

A venue can publish 24-hour access and still have conditions on it. One Winnipeg venue, Invictus Golf, states plainly that it is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and notes in the same breath that the doors may be locked between 2am and 5am, with a number to call. That is honest of them, and it is the kind of detail that only appears if you read the venue's own page rather than a directory listing.

We recorded hours exactly as each venue states them, which means our own count of 65 is the count of venues that say they never close. If you are booking a bay for 3am on a Tuesday, the thing to check is not the homepage — it is whether the booking system will actually sell you that hour.

And a reminder that the other 17 venues publish no hours at all. For those, the honest answer is that we do not know, and neither will you until you phone.

Only 35 venues pair 24/7 with TrackMan

The other half of the question is what you are hitting into when you get there. Of the 160:

• 65 are open 24 hours
• 57 run TrackMan of some generation
• 35 do both
• 12 specifically name TrackMan iO, the indoor-optimised unit

So roughly one venue in five in the country will let you book a middle-of-the-night hour on TrackMan. What else is out there, by count: Uneekor at 18 venues, Impact Vision at 17, GolfZon at 11, Foresight at 8, HD Golf at 6, Full Swing and TARGET at 5 each. Twenty-three venues do not say what they run.

None of those are bad machines. But if you have been practising on one system and want your numbers to be comparable, it is worth knowing before you book rather than after.

Nine cities have indoor golf and nothing open overnight

Of the 31 cities and districts in the list, nine have at least one indoor golf venue and not a single one open 24 hours. If you live in one of those, your options after 10pm are a drive or nothing — which is the gap our newer locations were built to fill.

How to check for yourself

Everything above is countable from the list, which is grouped by province and city and shows each venue's hours, simulator and address, with a link to the site we took it from. We update it as venues open, close and change. If we have something wrong about yours, the page says how to tell us.

And the disclosure that ought to go with any list like this: we run six of the 24-hour venues in it. Every Shotgun Golf bay is open 24 hours a day on TrackMan iO, and the overnight rate is $15 an hour — the rates are here and how the door code works is here. We put our own venues in the same table as everyone else's precisely so you can compare them on the same fields.