New crop of five-star hotels compete in Toronto, Vancouver
In the past year alone, four luxury hotels – a new Four Seasons, the Shangri-La, the Trump Hotel and the Ritz-Carlton – have opened their doors and welcomed visitors to Canada's largest city. All have room rates starting at about $500 per night, according to their websites.
The most recent to open, the 259-room Four Seasons in the heart of the city’s posh Yorkville neighbourhood, marked the renewal of an iconic Canadian brand in its hometown. It also heralded the entry of celebrity chef Daniel Boulud onto the Great White North’s Michelin-star-deprived culinary scene.
This for a city that, prior to this recent development boom – and with the exception of a handful of high-end boutique hotels – lacked any true five-star accommodations.
“I think Toronto has been underserviced from a luxury hotel standpoint for years,” says Bill Stone, executive vice-president with real estate consultancy CBRE Hotels. “There have been hotels like the Windsor Arms or Hazelton, but they weren’t enough to service demand.”
Toronto isn’t Canada’s only city to experience a recent luxury lodgings boom. Vancouver has seen the addition of three new high-end properties since 2009, including a Shangri-La hotel, the Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel and the Rosewood Hotel Georgia.
But this flurry in five-star development begs a critical question: With the global economic recovery advancing at a snail’s pace and uncertainty hampering the spending plans of everyone from wealthier leisure travellers to major corporations, just how many high-priced hotel rooms can cities such as Toronto and Vancouver absorb?
David Larone, Toronto-based director of hospitality consulting firm PKF Consulting Inc., points to average daily rates rather than room count as the key metric to watch in predicting the potential success of this new round of development. He notes that in Toronto, the four new five-star properties have added slightly fewer than 1,000 rooms to the city's approximately 17,000-room downtown hotel supply. That may seem like a lot until taking into account the closure of the old Four Seasons and the one-time celebrity magnet Sutton Place, hotels which combined housed more than 700 rooms. (Both of those properties are being converted into condos.)
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