Casino Hotels

The casino occupies the former French and Québec pavilions from Expo 67 on Île Notre-Dame, and the hotel side of the operation is best understood as the calm counterweight to it. Guests are accommodated a short distance from the gaming floors on an island park in the middle of the Saint Lawrence, which means the view from a room is water, trees and the Montréal skyline rather than a car park.

What distinguishes the property is how much of it has nothing to do with gaming. There are several restaurants at genuinely different price points, a cabaret room with a working programme of shows, and the surrounding parkland is public and walkable in every season. The gaming floor is one facility among many, kept behind its own thresholds, and a guest who never opens that door still has a legible hotel stay built around the island, the food and the events calendar.

Cut into the escarpment above the Horseshoe Falls, Fallsview is a large full-service hotel whose defining feature is elevation. A substantial share of the rooms look directly at the falls, the upper-floor restaurants are positioned to make the same view the reason you booked the table, and the building connects by covered walkway into the wider tourist district so that winter weather is optional.

Below the guest floors sit the things large resorts are expected to provide — a spa, a pool, conference space, a theatre that brings in touring acts — and, among them, the gaming floor. The hotel handles a considerable volume of families and coach groups alongside gaming guests, and manages it by keeping the circulation routes separate. It is a resort hotel first, in a town built around a single view, and the room key is what buys you that view at six in the morning when the crowds are not there yet.

River Rock sits on the Fraser River in Richmond, minutes from Vancouver's airport and on the rail line into the city, and it trades heavily on that position. The hotel is the largest in the municipality, with a marina alongside it, and a great many guests use it simply as a well-run airport-adjacent property with a river outside the window and the SkyTrain at the door.

The resort's cultural weight comes from its show theatre, which has hosted a long run of touring music and comedy, and from a food offering that reflects Richmond itself — the Asian restaurants here are not an afterthought. Gaming happens on its own floor and is entirely avoidable. Judged strictly as a hotel, the strengths are logistical: late arrivals handled smoothly, quiet rooms despite the flight paths, and enough on site that a jet-lagged guest never has to arrange transport.

An hour or so north of Toronto on the shore of Lake Couchiching, Casino Rama is owned by the Chippewas of Rama First Nation, and the hotel is the anchor of a resort that draws people out of the city for a night rather than serving passing traffic. Rooms are generously sized, the property has a spa and a pool, and the surrounding lake country is the reason many guests extend to two nights in summer.

Its best-known asset is the Entertainment Centre, a purpose-built concert hall that has carried a steady schedule of major touring acts for decades and often sets the rhythm of a stay: dinner, a show, a room upstairs. Restaurants range from a buffet to more deliberate dining. The gaming floor is large and central to the resort's history, but the hotel is a straightforward destination property, and a guest can arrive for the music and the lake alone.