A casino hotel is a hotel. The gaming floor is one facility among restaurants, meeting space, entertainment venues and guest rooms, and in each of the four properties below it occupies a defined part of the building rather than the whole of it. This section describes them the way it describes everything else in this index: what the property is, where it sits, and what it does well.
Montreal, Canada
Montreal Casino & Hotel
The casino occupies the former French pavilion from the 1967 world exposition, on an island in the Saint Lawrence, and the building is the most distinctive thing about the property. Its stacked, angular form was never meant to be permanent, and it has aged into something more interesting than most purpose-built gaming architecture.
Guest accommodation, restaurants and a concert space share the site with the gaming floor, which sits across several levels of the pavilion. The island setting means the property is quieter than a downtown equivalent, with parkland immediately outside rather than city streets.
Getting there involves crossing a bridge, which changes the character of a stay: people arrive deliberately rather than wandering in.
Niagara Falls, Canada
Fallsview Casino Resort
Fallsview is built into the escarpment above the falls, and its principal asset is the view that gives it its name. A large share of the guest rooms and several of the restaurants face the water directly, and the property is planned so that the sightline is protected from the lobby upward.
Alongside the gaming floor there is a theatre used for touring acts, a spa, and a shopping concourse that connects into the surrounding tourist district. It functions as a full resort, with most of a stay possible without leaving the building — which matters in a place where winter weather regularly makes that appealing.
The scale is considerable and the property does not disguise it. This is a large, busy resort hotel, and it is good at being one.
Richmond, Canada
River Rock Casino Resort
River Rock sits on the Fraser River near Vancouver's airport, with its own marina and a rapid transit station at the door. That combination — water on one side, a direct rail line to the city on the other — defines how people use it.
The hotel component includes a tower of guest rooms above a show theatre, several restaurants and the gaming floor. Rooms on the upper river-facing floors look across the water toward the coastal mountains on clear days.
It is frequently used as a first or last night before a flight, and the property is organised with that in mind: late check-in, airport shuttle, and a lobby that stays awake.
Rama, Canada
Casino Rama Resort
Rama sits inland in Ontario cottage country, surrounded by lakes rather than city, and is owned and operated in partnership with the Chippewas of Rama First Nation. The setting gives it a different rhythm to an urban casino hotel — people tend to arrive for two or three nights rather than one.
The resort combines guest rooms, a substantial entertainment centre that hosts touring performers, several restaurants and a gaming floor. Golf, water and hiking are all within a short drive, and the property is used as a base for them as much as a destination in itself.
In summer the surrounding region fills up; in winter the resort becomes the main reason to be there, and it programmes accordingly.
