Casino Hotels

Expo 67 left Montreal a handful of extraordinary buildings, and two of them — the French and Quebec pavilions — became this property. The French pavilion is the one people photograph: a tall stack of aluminium fins that looked like the future in 1967 and still looks like nothing else on the river. Converting it to hospitality meant rebuilding the interior entirely while leaving that exterior geometry alone.

The property sits on Île Notre-Dame, reached by bridge through parkland, which gives it an unusual quality for a city hotel: no surrounding streets at all. Restaurants, a cabaret theatre and event space share the site with the gaming floor, and the island setting means guests arrive and then stay put.

Built into the escarpment above the Horseshoe Falls, the resort is entered at several different levels, and its whole plan is organised around one view. Upper guest rooms face the falls head-on; the public circulation keeps returning to the glass frontage rather than passing it once on the way in.

A theatre hosts touring acts through the year, and there is a spa, a long run of restaurants and a shopping concourse that carries on into the surrounding tourist district. It functions first as a large destination hotel — the gaming floor is one of several reasons the rooms fill.

The resort stands on the Fraser River in Richmond, minutes from Vancouver's airport and on the Canada Line into the city. It has its own marina, which is a genuinely unusual thing for a hotel of this type to own, and it gives the water frontage a purpose beyond a view from the window.

Rooms are divided between a main tower and a quieter low-rise building alongside it. A theatre, conference floors and a spread of restaurants fill out the rest. Much of the traffic comes down to position: it is the last easy stop before a morning flight, and the property is sized and staffed for exactly that.

Ninety minutes north of Toronto, in the lakes and farmland around Orillia, this resort stands on Chippewas of Rama First Nation land and is owned by the First Nation. That ownership is not confined to paperwork — Indigenous artwork, design motifs and naming run through the public spaces and the guest floors.

A hotel tower is paired with an entertainment centre that has booked touring musicians for decades, along with a spa and a range of restaurants. The setting is rural enough that the property works as a weekend destination in its own right, with the gaming floor one element of a larger site.