Casino Hotels

Few hotels in this category have a building of this provenance. The complex occupies pavilions raised for Expo 67 on Île Notre-Dame — angular, glazed, standing alone on an island in the Saint Lawrence and reached by bridge or by metro from the city.

Accommodation is handled in an adjoining hotel operation, and the surroundings are parkland: Parc Jean-Drapeau, the Olympic rowing basin, the motor-racing circuit that closes the island for a weekend each summer. Most stays are built around something happening outside rather than inside.

Restaurants, a cabaret-format show room and function suites are arranged around a central atrium that runs up through several levels. One of those levels holds the gaming floor, run by the provincial gaming corporation. It is one facility among the others, and the building was not designed around it.

The resort is cut into the escarpment above the Horseshoe Falls, and the whole plan follows the slope. Upper guest floors look directly at the falls. Public levels step down the hillside so that lobbies and dining rooms share the same outlook rather than reserving it for the most expensive rooms.

This is a large full-service hotel by any measure: several hundred rooms, a spa, an indoor shopping promenade, and a purpose-built theatre that runs touring concerts and comedy through the year. Meeting and banquet space takes up a substantial share of the lower floors.

The gaming floor sits alongside the theatre and dining levels, off the main circulation rather than across it. Guests arriving for the falls can reach the viewing areas on foot, downhill, in a few minutes.

Location defines this one. River Rock stands on the Fraser River in Richmond, minutes from Vancouver International Airport and directly on the Canada Line rapid transit route into downtown Vancouver. In practice it functions as an airport-adjacent conference hotel with a resort attached.

The property includes a hotel tower, a riverside marina, a show theatre used by touring acts, and a range of restaurants from quick counters to longer sit-down rooms. Richmond's own dining — among the strongest Cantonese and Taiwanese cooking in North America — is immediately outside the door.

Rooms upstairs are ordinary full-service hotel rooms and are regularly booked for meetings and events with no connection to the lower levels, where the gaming floor is located.

Casino Rama stands on Chippewas of Rama First Nation land near Orillia, in the lake country roughly ninety minutes north of Toronto. That setting gives the property a resort character an urban hotel cannot manufacture: water, forest and space around the building.

The hotel runs to several hundred rooms and includes a spa, with golf nearby. Its entertainment centre has programmed touring acts for decades, and for a good share of guests the concert calendar — not the building — is what fixes the date of the trip.

Dining ranges from a buffet through several full-service restaurants. The gaming floor is one of the resort's facilities. Many visitors use the hotel as a base for Lake Couchiching and the Trent-Severn Waterway and spend most of the day away from it.