Hotel Review: The Ritz-Carlton Toronto brings luxury to the city
Posted on 12 July 2011 with no comments from readers
Before the opening of the Ritz Carlton earlier this year, and the Four Seasons, Toronto could not boast a luxury hotel in the top category. Remarkable really for the largest city in Canada with 4.6 million living besides the shores of Lake Ontario.
Still this is not the best time to be opening such a five-star hotel or two. Not far away from the Ritz-Carlton are the partly completed Trump and Shangri-La hotel towers that look as though construction has seriously slowed since the global financial crisis.
Boom-to-bust
That is always a problem. Hotels are conceived in booms and born in crises. You could say the same about the new Dubai International Financial Centre’s Ritz-Carlton, although that hotel has benefited form the pick up in Dubai tourism and trade this year.
The Ritz-Carlton Toronto is a 53-storey building with a hotel on the first 20 floors and 159 serviced apartments for the remainder. Apparently 30 per cent of the apartments are still unsold after five years.
For the best of the 267 rooms choose a club floor with a Lake Ontario view. You have a pinkish-white marble bathroom with a TV concealed in the mirror; all the usual amenities, large-screen LCD TV, Nespresso machine, Bose i-Pod dock, free Wi-Fi, complementary pressing for two garments a day and the club lounge.
ArabianMoney always likes the club lounge on business trips. There is not only a desk to work from but a comfortable place to sit and read the paper, and the constant procession of snack presentations from the chef and complementary beverages.
If you wanted to eat lightly then all you require is in the club, and it never gets boring. The hotel does also have an excellent restaurant on the ground floor, an outside terrace and a $250,000 cheese cave.
Service standards
The spa is highly rated as one of the best in the city and you can work out in the large gym and swim in the indoor pool. However, the greatest charm of the Ritz-Carlton as always is its superb levels of service, and in North American there is quite a lot of competition in service standards.
A request for help with a tour to visit Niagara Falls brought forward the best from Hanut Bal at the concierge desk that did not make any charge for this assistance. In the club any slight mention of something missing and it quickly appeared.
Then you have arguably the finest location in the city. Just minutes walk from the seafront and downtown and less than half an hour from the city airport. You have Toronto at your feet.
The hotel lobby and general interior decor is also to the highest standards of modern design but that would mean nothing if you were not just so well looked after. We think Toronto will soon be wondering how it managed so long without the Ritz.
