Home/Casino hotels in Canada

A guide for guests · six properties · four provinces

Canada’s casino hotels, judged as places to stay

Theatres, dining rooms, spas and settings: all the parts of these resorts that a guest can enjoy without setting foot on a gaming floor. The floors themselves are the one thing we leave out.

Three grand hotel buildings above clipped gardens under a blue sky, with modern towers in the distance — Illustration of grand resort architecture; the six Canadian properties are described below.

Gaming revenue lets a resort build things a normal hotel budget never could: a theatre scaled for real touring productions, a spa whose pools are properly engineered, restaurants staffed by a full kitchen team, and a location picked for its view instead of for passing traffic.

We run a small hotel in an old fruit cannery twenty-five minutes downstream from one of these resorts, and guests regularly ask us where else in Canada is worth a night. So here are six properties that turn that money into a genuinely good stay, whether or not you have any interest in the reason they were built.

We look at each one simply as a place to sleep and eat: the architecture, the spaces open to every guest, and what lies just outside the door. Gaming halls do not appear — we offer no walkthrough, no list of games, no mention of stakes and no explanation of how anything there works. That part of the building we pass over entirely.

Montréal Casino & Hotel

Stay type: Casino resort with hotel rooms
Setting: Île Notre-Dame, Montréal, Québec
Seen by us: September 2026

Belle Époque hotel facades above landscaped gardens, with modern towers rising behind — Library image for illustration, not a photograph of the Montréal property.

Under the roof

Nobody sat down to design a hotel here. The heart of the complex is France’s exhibition pavilion from Expo 67, its tower clad in fins of aluminium and meant to be dismantled once the fair closed; the neighbouring Québec pavilion was joined on beside it, and decade after decade of extensions have wrapped the two. The result reads like a cross-section through sediment — sixties optimism in the metalwork, glass atriums from the years that followed, and interiors redone so frequently that fresh finishes rub shoulders with much older ones.

Meals range from a formal dining room to quick counters and outdoor terraces; a cabaret hall supplies the nightlife, and the banquet rooms face the river. If you stay, press for a high room on the water side, because that outlook is what you are paying for.

Past the entrance

This is an artificial island in mid-river, so the surroundings are lawns and trees, not streets. Parc Jean-Drapeau takes up most of it; the rowing channel dug for the 1976 Summer Olympics lies alongside; and across the greenery stands Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, the United States pavilion of 1967, which has housed the Biosphère since. The Grand Prix commandeers the island’s roads for one weekend a year. From Jean-Drapeau metro station the city centre is only a few stops away, and two bridges link the island to the shore for drivers and walkers alike.

Fallsview Casino Resort

Stay type: Casino resort, hotel tower
Setting: Niagara Falls, Ontario
Seen by us: September 2026

Three hotel buildings side by side: a palace with a gilded dome, a city hotel with a glass rotunda and a curved tower above a marina — Library image for illustration, not a photograph of Fallsview.

Under the roof

Our nearest neighbour on this list, twenty-five minutes up the Parkway from our lofts. The resort is set into the bank above the gorge, so what looks like a few floors from the street goes on dropping level after level as you walk inside towards the water. The hotel tower stands on the upper ground, and from the middle floors up most rooms face the falls. Below sits a whole resort in miniature: a theatre big enough for touring headliners, a spa, an indoor pool, restaurants from white tablecloth to grab-and-go, and a retail arcade serving as the internal high street that ties them together.

The public spaces are unashamedly theatrical, with domed ceilings and glass walls towards the gorge, and they look best at night once the falls are lit.

Past the entrance

Horseshoe Falls is reached by walking down through the parkland on the gorge side, and the promenade along the rim is the best half-hour stroll on the Canadian bank. About ten minutes north, Clifton Hill offers arcades and haunted houses — delightful or exhausting, depending on your companions. The station and the Rainbow Bridge to the United States lie northeast. Follow the Parkway north, downstream along the river, and within half an hour the crowds give way to orchards, vineyards and, eventually, our own front gate in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

River Rock Casino Resort

Stay type: Casino resort and marina
Setting: Richmond, British Columbia
Seen by us: September 2026

A triptych of hotels: an ornate stone facade, a modern hotel behind a lawn and a white palace on a wooded hillside — Library image for illustration, not a photograph of River Rock.

Under the roof

A long, low building laid out along the Fraser, with the guest rooms held back from the river and the public spaces pushed out to the bank. The style is West Coast rather than palatial: big timbers, cut stone, acres of glazing and the muted colours of the river under cloud, which is how the river usually looks. There is a theatre that takes full touring shows, a spa, a row of restaurants with a strong Asian leaning (exactly right for Richmond), and a marina with a boardwalk on the water side.

That boardwalk is the part most visitors miss. It is where the resort stops performing and simply lets you watch a working river go by.

Past the entrance

Richmond is dead flat, which makes it good for walking and even better for cycling. Paths along the dykes stretch for miles in both directions; heading southwest they bring you to Steveston, an old fishing village whose cannery is now a museum — a building we feel some kinship with — and whose wharf still has boats selling their catch direct. The Canada Line station is right next door and reaches downtown Vancouver in under half an hour, and the international airport is near enough to make this a sensible last night before an early departure.

Casino Rama Resort

Stay type: Casino resort with hotel
Setting: Rama, Ontario
Seen by us: September 2026

Domed stone hotels along a waterfront promenade, with three modern towers joined at the top in the background — Library image for illustration, not a photograph of Casino Rama.

Under the roof

Nothing here climbs. The resort spreads out across the site and joins its parts with indoor streets, so guests move between rooms, restaurants and the entertainment centre without going outside — a wise plan this far north, where winters are taken seriously. The entertainment centre is the biggest hall in this guide and is programmed to match, which is why most visitors make the drive up Highway 11.

The site is the land of the Chippewas of Rama First Nation, a fact that is visible in the building itself rather than in a slogan: work by Indigenous artists was commissioned for the public spaces, and the naming and the materials follow its lead. A spa, meeting rooms and dining from casual to formal complete the picture.

Past the entrance

Lake Couchiching lies immediately to the west, the resort sitting on its quieter eastern shore above Orillia. The town is a short drive away, with its shops, a waterfront park and the southbound coach. Beyond Orillia begins cottage country: the Trent–Severn Waterway rises northward through its chain of locks to Georgian Bay, and the roads along either bank make for an aimless, rewarding day behind the wheel.

V & VI · no photographs yet

Two more, in brief

Worth knowing about if your travels take you east. We have stayed at both, but have no pictures to show you.

Casino New Brunswick

Stay type: Casino with hotel and concert hall
Setting: Moncton, New Brunswick
Seen by us: September 2026

A compact resort on the northern edge of Moncton, near Magnetic Hill, pairing a mid-sized hotel with an entertainment hall that brings in Maritime and touring acts. The rooms are practical rather than grand; the appeal lies in the position.

Magnetic Hill’s famous optical illusion, its zoo and a summer water park are all minutes away. Downtown, the Petitcodiac River’s tidal bore rolls in twice a day, and the towering Hopewell Rocks on the Bay of Fundy are within an easy morning’s drive.

Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Ottawa

Stay type: Casino resort with hotel tower
Setting: South Ottawa, Ontario
Seen by us: September 2026

Built on the site of the Rideau Carleton Raceway, where harness racing still takes place, and extended in recent years with a hotel tower and a concert venue. The style is the brand’s familiar mix of music memorabilia and dark, glossy finishes.

It suits an early flight: Ottawa’s airport is a short drive, and Parliament Hill, the ByWard Market and the Rideau Canal — skating in winter, boating in summer — are reachable in under half an hour.

A deliberate omission

About the gaming floors

All six properties are licensed by their provinces, and each runs its gaming operation separately from its hotel. We do not describe those areas and cannot book anything inside them for you. Minimum ages, required identification and house rules vary from province to province and change from time to time, so please ask the hotel’s front desk directly.

Should gambling no longer feel like entertainment, whether for you or for someone you care about, free, confidential help is available in every province mentioned here:

Ontario: ConnexOntario
Québec: Jeu : aide et référence
British Columbia: the province’s Gambling Support BC service
New Brunswick: the provincial Addiction and Mental Health Helpline

This page does not encourage anyone to gamble. We write about hotels, and we are glad to help plan a trip in which the casino plays no part at all.

Quick recap

Elsewhere on this page

If you are choosing for the building rather than the location, these are the sections to reread:

Montréal — a world’s fair pavilion that outlived every plan to demolish it.
Niagara Falls — the view, the night lighting, and the easiest to combine with a stay with us.
Richmond — the calm one, with a riverside boardwalk and a train into Vancouver.
Rama — the biggest hall here, and the clearest sense of whose land it stands on.
Moncton and Ottawa — smaller, practical, and well placed for day trips.

Six properties, four provinces

Stay for the building, skip the tables

Each of these is worth a night for its architecture and its setting. And when your route passes Niagara, thirty-eight lofts in a 1913 cannery are waiting downstream from the falls.

Contact the front desk See our lofts