Toronto Hotels

[current]

Globe article:

Carlton Street’s Holiday Inn Opens With Hipper Lodgings

STEVE LADURANTAYE — REAL ESTATE REPORTER
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Mar. 22, 2011 7:38PM EDT
Last updated Tuesday, Mar. 22, 2011 11:45PM EDT

The largest Holiday Inn in Canada has quietly opened for business on Carlton Street, as the hotel chain bets that upscale amenities at a lower price will woo tourists away from the slate of luxury hotels that have been added to the city’s stable.

The hotel – which was formerly a Days Inn and has undergone $20-million of renovations – has 514 rooms on 23 floors. The lobby features marble floors and hip furniture, the staff wear crisp black uniforms and a custom fragrance is pumped through the halls.

It’s a long way from the basic lobbies of days past, and more in line with the $1-billion re-branding initiative Holiday Inn launched in 2008 to move away from what its management called “a dangerous middle ground” in which investors were still seeing good returns but travellers were beginning to seek hipper lodgings.

“As generations grow up, their preferences change and we need to keep up with the times,” said Gopal Rao, regional vice-president of the Holiday Inn’s parent company IHG Canada. “It’s not so much about fixing something that is broken as keeping things current.”

The hotel did a soft opening earlier this month, and will officially open April 6. It’s the largest Holiday Inn to open in Canada or the United States in 2011.

With more than a thousand luxury hotel rooms being added to the Toronto market this year and next, the chain felt the way to compete was to offer the same amenities – a spa, several restaurants and staff well trained in customer service – as their world-renowned competitors.

“We call that amenity creep in this business,” said Alam Pirani, executive managing director of Colliers International Hotels. “It gets to the point where every hotel has a flat-screen television.”

The Thompson Hotel and the Ritz-Carlton have opened in the past year, and Shangri-La, Four Seasons and Trump all plan to open within the next 12 months. Combined, they add about 1,000 luxury suites to the city’s inventory.

While luxury rooms tend to start at $400 a night, the Holiday Inn charges closer to $175.....


Read More: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...m_source=Toron

[Taller, Better]

Man, that was one Lonnnnnngggggg retrofit. Thought it would never open. Looks nice from the Carleton sidewalk, and I don't miss that hideous old Dazed Inn. The interior decor seemed to be "Early Rec-Room"

[current]

Openfile.ca online article (http://toronto.openfile.ca/):

A Revolution, Stalled, at Westin Harbour Castle Hotel

Reported by Paul Terefenko
Reported on Friday, March 18, 2011
Updated on Friday, March 18, 2011

Picture a revolutionary dining experience. Now take that statement literally. You’ll probably come up with 360, the revolving restaurant in the CN Tower—a tourist’s delight providing a circumferential seated cruise 114 storeys up the tower. It also happens to be Toronto’s last dinner spinner, after the slow-rotating culinary pod filled with tourists at the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel ceased to revolve.

“What it used to be when it was rotating was a tourist attraction to kids,” says Sabrina Capone at the Westin. You can see the allure. Walking into a hotel and taking the elevator to the novel rotating restaurant with the brood was a good way to dodge a pricey trip up to the CN deck.

Capone worked at the thirty-eighth-floor restaurant just as it was farmed out in February 2001. The hotel made a deal with a group interested in turning away from the location’s tourist space station past; by that time, the restaurant had evolved into “a gong show of people coming up to look out the window,” says Capone. The obvious part: it was bad for business. “Can you imagine being there, eating, and people coming to look out the window?” she says....



.....The view wasn’t better [when rotating] because everything was moving around the window, but there was a mechanical room in the middle,” he says. That mechanical room, filled with the guts that made the space rotate, blocked views across the restaurant and limited seating options. “If you wanted do a table for twenty people, you couldn’t,” says Viscardi, who bumped capacity from 150 to 238 by ditching the motor and other critical parts for rotation.

“It’s permanent,” he says of the stoppage, but says costs were not a factor. “The mechanics are not complicated. For us, the challenge ten years ago was creating something spectacular.” That challenge, Viscardi points out, cost him $2 million in renovations, money that eclipses any cost it'd take to keep the floor spinning day after day....


....When the Westin Harbour Castle was built in 1975—it was originally a Hilton—that part of the city was hardly a destination unless you were hauling cargo. The builders were banking on a quick shift in the area.

“They were the very first instance of post-industrial, recreation-based tourism happening on the waterfront,” explains ERA Architects’ Graeme Stewart. “The Harbour Castle was born of an era when builders thought it would go from wasteland to modern mecca of towers, elevated highways, and Expo ’67 stuff.” Stuff like revolving restaurants.

But the rail yards didn’t vanish overnight. Decades passed before condos began taking over. “The Harbour Castle sat there for years by itself," says Stewart. He pictures investors thinking of lifting people out of the industrial experience, protecting them from their rotting industry neighbours with ramps leading away from street level and into the hotel. “This really was a moon colony.”

Fittingly for a moon base, you had an escape pod on the roof, ready to spirit you away from the refineries and railyards. “These circular observatories on top of buildings were feats of engineering—something to be proud of, whereas now they’re just campy,” says Stewart.

Mardukhi agrees that the engineering tech has improved a lot. “It’s almost routine now,” he says, adding that he doesn’t see rotation projects stopping, at least internationally. “Now we’re building rotating buildings to sell lake or sea views in all directions.”

Meanwhile, Viscardi says his new spin on the space begins at the end of March. “We’re adding a fantastic wine bar with a wine cellar concept.” He plans to keep the place open through May as the facelift—coinciding with Toula’s ten-year-anniversary—progresses....

Read More: http://toronto.openfile.ca/toronto/f...r-castle-hotel

[AndrewJM3D]

89 Chestnut Street used to be a hotel and also had a rotating restaurant. Personally I think theyt should have kept the Harbour Castle a rotating restaurant. That's the only reason I might go there.

[YU-AMC]

Originally Posted by AndrewJM3D

89 Chestnut Street used to be a hotel and also had a rotating restaurant. Personally I think theyt should have kept the Harbour Castle a rotating restaurant. That's the only reason I might go there.

I have been told it was much cheaper to run it back in the days. Now I am not sure if that is true or not.

[AndrewJM3D]

I always figured as a Hotel restaurant it was a money pit anyway, rotating floor or not.

[YU-AMC]

Originally Posted by AndrewJM3D

I always figured as a Hotel restaurant it was a money pit anyway, rotating floor or not.

Yep. The chances are that their clientele is mostly business, so they end up going up there anyways.

[Taller, Better]

Hotel dining rooms are often loss-leaders. It's a Catch-22 situation; you must keep the restaurant open in order to have the hotel, but except for breakfast, guests don't feel obligated to eat there. Tourists tend to wander out for dinner. Usually hotel restaurants are quite large, too, and difficult to fill every night.

[eastadl]

Gee, just looking online and hotels in Toronto seem to be significantly cheaper than the Vancouver ones. Any recommendations of where to stay. Im sure there was a thread on here about it somewhere

[yin_yang]

Wow...$175 a night. Lulz. What a rip-off!

[ACT7]

Originally Posted by eastadl

Gee, just looking online and hotels in Toronto seem to be significantly cheaper than the Vancouver ones. Any recommendations of where to stay. Im sure there was a thread on here about it somewhere

The average price difference between the two cities is approx. $5/night last year. Q1 this year is a whole other story. Most of Vancouver's price appreciation was due to the Olympics last year.

http://www.hrscorporate.com/business...-rates-q1-2011

Dig around and you'll find deals in either city. I always stay at the Sutton in Vancouver for $140/night.

[Taller, Better]

Use Expedia. Trust me, it is cheaper than booking directly with the hotel. You may get some $99 deals.

[ACT7]

We use expedia corporate (or egencia as they have changed their name to) and the Sutton is always discounted by a couple of hundred dollars.

[InTheBeach]

Originally Posted by Taller, Better

Hotel dining rooms are often loss-leaders. It's a Catch-22 situation; you must keep the restaurant open in order to have the hotel, but except for breakfast, guests don't feel obligated to eat there. Tourists tend to wander out for dinner. Usually hotel restaurants are quite large, too, and difficult to fill every night.

I hate hotel restaurants for the most part. The prices are inflated and the quality is average at best.

But I must say that I eat in them all the time when I travel on business. For me it boils down to three main reasons:

- It is easier to fill in my expense report if I have meals on the hotel bill

- I usually don't have time to go elsewhere (esp. for breakfast)

- Once you have been to some place a few times, you really don't care anymore about seeing the place and want to get in, do your business, and get out (unless it is a larger city - so that might explain your point about restaurants in Toronto's case)

[Taller, Better]

Huge difference between the eating habits of touristos and business-types. Business types are trapped in because of time and the expense account; touristos are not. There are hotels with excellent food, but you have to know your way to them, and that is hard when you are travelling from town to town. Most hotel restaurants are blah.

[current]

yahoo news article:
The 10 Luxury Hotels Chinese Tourists Love Best

AFP Relax News – Tue, 28 Aug, 2012 10:50 AM EDT

Top 10 list

1. Sheraton
2. Hilton
3. Shangri-La
4. InterContinental
5. Westin
6. Four Seasons
7. The Peninsula
8. Kempinski
9. Nikko
10. Ritz-Carlton


Sheraton is the most popular luxury hotel brand on the internet in China, followed by Hilton and Shangri-la, according to a survey carried out between January and March this year. According to the survey, Sheraton, a Starwood brand, came on the top of the list with almost 14 percent of the overall searches. The report attributes the success of the brand to the fact that Sheraton was the first western hotel brand to arrive in China. The brand arrived in 1985 right after the economic opening of the country. Sheraton has plans to open 12 new hotels across China in 2012 and expand its portfolio to 80 properties by 2015.

Among the non-western brands, Hong-Kong based Shangri-la comes in third position followed by The Peninsula, also based in Hong Kong, in seventh position. The Nikko Hotels brand, based in Japan and originally owned by Japan Airlines, came in ninth position. Under the name "The world luxury index China: Hotels," the report carried out by Digital Luxury Group, analyzed more than 170 million online searches during the first trimester of 2012. The searches covered over 68 brand names in more than 75 domestic and international destinations that were generated in mainland China in either Chinese or English. Over 91 pe cent came from Chinese search engine Baidu and around 9 percent came from Google.

http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/top...145017788.html

[Taller, Better]

The Sheraton is a "luxury" hotel?

[Epi]

To be fair, Interncontinentals aren't generally nicer than Sheratons around the world. Ditto for Hiltons in North America (Hiltons elsewhere are nicer). Westins aren't always that nice either, you only have to look at Toronto's two Westins which are 4-star at best. I think that list is a bit too inclusive in it's usage of 'luxury'.

But then again hotels in China are weird. Every other hotel is called '5-star', so it has less meaning there than elsewhere.

[Taller, Better]

Yeah, the star system has been so abused that it is completely meaningless.

[hkskyline]

Originally Posted by Epi

To be fair, Interncontinentals aren't generally nicer than Sheratons around the world. Ditto for Hiltons in North America (Hiltons elsewhere are nicer). Westins aren't always that nice either, you only have to look at Toronto's two Westins which are 4-star at best. I think that list is a bit too inclusive in it's usage of 'luxury'.

But then again hotels in China are weird. Every other hotel is called '5-star', so it has less meaning there than elsewhere.

Westin is almost always a 5-star hotel in China, while Sheraton is 4-5-star. They are mostly new properties, and many live up to the 5-star label. Their brand positioning is a bit different in this part of the world - they've gone upmarket.