Pretty cool report the other day from hotels.com showed that Toronto is now the third most booked international city for U.S. travellers. The report, which analyzed bookings on hotels.com, found that U.S. travel types booked the most rooms in London, followed by Paris. Toronto was number three, moving ahead of Rome. Which is pretty cool. After Rome, in position five, was Vancouver, followed by Tokyo, Hong Kong, Montreal, Barcelona and Niagara Falls. It’s a not a definitive study in that it only takes into account bookings on one website. But it’s encouraging for Toronto and Canadian tourism types, I’d think… Read more
Canada
Earlier this week I was talking about the latest Canadian/American Automobile Association ratings and noted that Canada now has 11 combined hotels and restaurants with five-diamond ratings, the top award they give out. Now comes another series of ratings, this time from the travel folks at Forbes. They’ve got a pretty different list. Radically different, actually. Most notable, I think, is that both Forbes and the Automobile Association folks put the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto on their five-diamond (five-star for Forbes) list. That means the Four Seasons flagship property (in Yorkville) is the only property in Canada to have Read more
Sex on the Beach is apparently more than just a cocktail for Canadians. A great new study by the folks at Expedia.ca finds that 22 per cent of Canadians surveyed admit to “getting frisky” on the sand while on holidays. Which should put the lie to that stereotype of button-down, buttoned-up Canucks, right? Actually, the provincial breakdown is pretty interesting. A full 28 per cent of Quebeckers say they’ll get down on the beach, while a pretty sizeable 25 per cent of Ontario folks said they do the same. Folks in British Columbia may think they’re all trendy and cutting-edge Read more
The air wars get more intense every week, it seems. And with it our choices for air travel increase. Calgary-based WestJet today announced “its most comprehensive schedule release since the airline took to the skies in 1996.” The airline said it’s adding five new routes, increasing frequency on 20 existing routes across the network, and moving five seasonal routes to year-round service. The biggest news for folks in the right-hand side of the country is that WestJet Encore is moving east (as expected) to start service between Toronto and Thunder Bay, as well as between Thunder Bay and Winnipeg. “The Read more
Canada has a new five-diamond hotel. And it’s a local success story. The American Automobile Association and Canadian Automobile Association last week quietly released their new list of top-rated hotels and restaurants in Canada and the U.S., and it gave the (relatively) new Four Seasons hotel in Toronto a coveted five-diamond rating. That brings the number of Canadian properties with five-diamond status to five in Canada: the Four Seasons in Toronto’s Yorkville area, the Ritz-Carlton Toronto downtown, the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal, the Four Seasons in Whistler, B.C. and the Shangri-La in Vancouver. Which means Ontario is the only province with Read more
