An independent desk covering Canadian casino hotels

Why this site exists

Canada has a substantial casino hotel sector and very little honest writing about it. Search for a property and you find the operator\'s own material, aggregated user scores with no common standard behind them, or affiliate pages that are really about something else entirely. What was missing was the ordinary thing a travel desk does: go, look, take notes, and say plainly what a place is like.

So that is what we do. 18 properties across 7 provinces, reviewed to the same structure, scored on the same scale, revisited when something changes. We publish what we would want to read before booking a room.

What we do — and what we do not

How we review

Every property gets the same sequence, and the sequence is the reason two reviews written a province apart can be compared at all.

1. We book and pay at public rates. No hosted stays, no comped rooms, no press trips.
2. We walk the floor twice — a weekday afternoon and a weekend evening — because they are different buildings.
3. We count and check. Machine and table counts come from operator material, checked against what is in the room. Every review states the month it was last verified.
4. We stay in a standard room, not a suite, and eat at least one sit-down meal.
5. We look at the responsible-gaming provision — how visible it is, whether staffed support exists, where the ATMs sit.
6. We revisit annually, and immediately after a renovation, an ownership change or a significant change to the gaming floor.

What the score means

Each property is scored out of 10 on four criteria and weighted into a single editorial score. The weighting is fixed and public:

Scores are editorial judgements, not measurements, and they are ours rather than an average of anybody else\'s. A 7.3 is not a bad property — it is a property that does a narrower job well. The written verdict always matters more than the number.

Editorial independence

We accept no payment, hospitality, gifts or advertising from casino operators, hotel groups or their agencies, and no property sees a review before it publishes. We do not take part in affiliate programmes for gambling operators and we do not carry gambling advertising on this site. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed at the top of every affected page before it changes anything else.

Corrections matter to us. If a fact here is wrong or out of date — a machine count, a dress code, an address, a phone number — write to [email protected] and we will check it and amend the page. Substantive corrections are noted in the review.

Who we are

Lodge Portfolio is published by Lodge Portfolio Media Inc., a company incorporated in Ontario and registered under Business Number 792416053. The desk is a small editorial team based in Toronto — travel and hospitality writers, not gambling professionals, which is deliberate. We write for visitors.

Enquiries from properties that would like to be considered for review are welcome at [email protected]. To be explicit about what that does and does not mean: we will read every one, coverage is never for sale, and being reviewed is not the same as being recommended.