Casino Hotels

The Montreal property sits on Île Notre-Dame, on the parkland island south of the city that was built for the 1967 world exposition, and it reuses pavilion architecture from that period — angular, multi-level, and unlike almost any other hotel of its type in North America.

As a hotel it offers rooms, several restaurants across different price points, meeting and function space, and easy access to the surrounding park, the rowing basin and the circuit that runs around the island. Guests staying for a conference or a summer weekend will use most of the building without necessarily setting foot on the gaming floor, which occupies its own clearly separated levels.

Being on an island rather than in the downtown core gives the place a self-contained feel; the bridge back into central Montréal is short, but you are aware of crossing it.

Fallsview is built into the escarpment above the Niagara gorge, and the hotel's planning is organised almost entirely around the view. Guest rooms on the upper floors face the falls directly, and the public levels step down the slope so that the restaurants and lounges get the same outlook.

Beyond rooms, the resort runs a substantial entertainment theatre, a spa, a retail concourse and a wide spread of dining, and it draws a good deal of traffic from people attending a show or a conference. The gaming floor is one of the larger facilities in the building, but it is one facility among many rather than the hotel's only function.

It connects into the wider Niagara Falls tourist district by walkway, which makes it unusually easy to leave the property on foot — not always true of resorts this size.

River Rock occupies a site on the Fraser River in Richmond, minutes from Vancouver's international airport and directly served by the rapid transit line into the city. That position accounts for much of its business: it functions as an airport hotel, a conference venue and a weekend destination in roughly equal measure.

The property includes a marina, a theatre used for touring acts, a spread of restaurants and a large block of guest rooms in two connected buildings. Rooms on the river side look across the water towards the airport, and aircraft movements are part of the view.

The gaming floor is the facility the property is named for, but the hotel is used heavily by travellers who are there for the transit connection and nothing else.

Casino Rama sits near Orillia in Ontario's lake country, on land belonging to the Chippewas of Rama First Nation, and it is owned by the community — a fact reflected in the artwork and naming throughout the buildings.

The resort combines a hotel of several hundred rooms with a large entertainment centre that has hosted touring musicians for decades, a range of restaurants, and conference facilities used year-round. Its setting, roughly an hour and a half north of Toronto among lakes and cottage country, means it draws a summer leisure crowd as well as event traffic.

The gaming floor is one part of a property whose other half is very much a resort hotel: people book here for a concert, a company meeting, or a weekend on the water.