How We Read A Hotel

This guide describes hotels as buildings and as places. It asks where a property stands, what it is made into, why it came out that way, and what a visitor has to accept in order to stay there. It does not describe a stay, because a stay belongs to whoever had it.

Each entry keeps to the same five lines. THE PLACE says where the property stands and what is around it. THE BUILDING says what the structure is and what its owners and architects have published about it. WHY IT IS LIKE THAT gives the reason: climate, custom, history, or a site that permitted nothing else. WHAT IT ASKS OF YOU says what the place expects of a visitor.

We do not grade a property and we give no advice about running one. A working hotel manages its own building, and a guide written from published material is in no position to judge anything it has not examined. Where a source says only that a place exists, we say only that.

In the ice properties nothing is permanent. Those villages are put together at the start of the season and taken away when it ends, which means the site can differ from one winter to the next. We say so in every entry in that section, because it changes what a booking is.

WORTH A NOTE is one line of preparation rather than complaint. It tells you something that changes how you pack, how you arrive or how you plan the journey home. It is never a fault, and it is never an opinion about how a place is run.

The line that closes an entry, Put down, carries a month and a year. That is when we last opened the material an entry rests on. Nothing else on the page carries a date, because a building outlives the reading of it.

Material comes from hotels themselves, from architects and from those who have published work on the buildings. We write in our own words rather than repeating a description, and we take nothing from a source that does not name itself.

We publish no prices, no stars, no ratings, no booking of any kind and no paid placement. Nobody pays to appear here and nobody pays to have an entry changed. Corrections are made because they are correct.

There is a Casino Hotels section because four Canadian resorts are worth describing as buildings: converted exposition pavilions, a resort cut into an escarpment, a theatre beside a marina, a hall on First Nation land. The gaming room is not described or assessed anywhere on this site.