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The line between
Two hotels can offer the same night and divide it in completely different ways. One puts the bath at the end of a public corridor and leaves the room almost bare. Another puts everything into the room and leaves the corridor as a passage and nothing else. The difference is not a matter of comfort, it is a matter of plan.
So this guide reads every hotel along one line: what is held in common by the whole house, and what is set aside for one party. Once you look for that line, buildings that seemed unrelated fall into the same family. A village of stone houses and a floor of sleeping pods both push almost everything outward, into space that everybody uses.
The slogan of the guide is the shortest form of the idea. In every hotel a line runs between what everyone shares and what is only yours.
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What goes in each of the three blocks
What is shared describes the parts of the building used by the whole house: halls, yards, baths, kitchens, bars, terraces, a lounge, a lift lobby, sometimes an entire village or an entire floor.
What is yours describes the enclosed part and its fittings: a room, a cabin, a capsule, a villa, a dome, and how much of daily life has been left inside it.
Where the line falls names the physical thing that divides them. A door, a curtain, a sliding panel, a blind, a stair, a gravel path. That is usually the most telling sentence in an entry.
None of the three blocks describes rules for guests. We have not checked dress, quiet hours, or who may walk where, and we do not write about access at all. Those things change, they differ between one visit and another, and they are the hotel's to state. A wall or a curtain is a fact about a building, and that is what we describe.
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Where the material comes from
Everything here is taken from published material: material issued by the hotels themselves, architectural descriptions, museum and municipal records, and press coverage. It is then written again in our own words. The month printed at the end of an entry is the month that material was last read, which is also the honest limit of how current the entry can be.
The guide does not publish prices, star classifications, ratings, opening hours, schedules, room counts or floor areas. It does not book, hold, or forward anything. There are no paid placements and no affiliate links, and no hotel can buy an entry or buy a change to one. A factual correction is free and always will be.
We also do not claim to have stayed anywhere. Three editors have kept this guide since 2021, all three write and all three travel, and photography is commissioned separately from the writing.
04 / 05
Why an international guide has a Casino Hotels section
Four Canadian resorts are grouped as Casino Hotels because they belong to the same argument as the rest of the guide, and in an unusually clear form. Their shared side is enormous: a concert hall of several thousand seats, a row of restaurants, a spa, a marina, a golf course. Their private side is one guest room of ordinary size.
That ratio is the reason they are here. A capsule hotel and a Canadian resort look nothing alike, and yet both have pushed almost everything a guest does out of the room and into space held in common.
The gaming floor is not described in this guide and is not assessed. We write nothing about play, odds, promotions or loyalty schemes, and we link to nothing of the kind. Casinos are for adults only. In Canada the minimum age is 19 in most provinces and 18 in Québec; elsewhere it depends on where you are.
If gambling stops being a game: in Ontario, ConnexOntario 1-866-531-2600; in Québec, 1-800-461-0140; in British Columbia, 1-888-795-6111. Outside Canada, look up the helpline for your own country.