In The News

Toronto's luxury hotel business is expanding at breakneck speed. Within just a few years Toronto will be home to 5 new hotels aimed at the wealthy traveler and the lavish Torontonian. Toronto Life profiles the first of these hotels, The Thompson Toronto, which will open its doors to the public within the next month. Situated in the King West neighbourhood (at 550 Wellington), the boutique hotel aims to double as an arts and fashion hub.

"The Thompson Toronto is the first international arm of a New York brand, and it comes to a city that's been slow to embrace its kind. Boutiques or "genre hotels" pour art and fashion from a cocktail shaker. Guests see them as anti-generic, even though many are now multinational chains. The best of them become cultural hubs, a scene of art shows and film screenings staffed by modelesque bartenders. The American hotelier Andr� Balazs calls his boutique chain The Standard, presumably since that's what it wants to be: the measure of vitality."

"Montreal saw the rise of boutiques in the early 2000s while the Toronto hotel market stood relatively still (unless you count the massive overhaul of the Windsor Arms, which had closed a tatty shell in 1991 and reopened elegantly in 1999). The last real estate bubble made investors skittish, and the city's inferiority complex fed the reticence. Were we world class? Not enough to deserve a bunch of nice hotels. Now, the GTA has swagger: a population boom, a cultural rebirth to flesh out its merits as a destination, and foreign investors snapping up our real estate."

"In the first blush of these changes, well before the economy turned, developers began planning several hotel projects to keep in step with the growth. The Ritz-Carlton, the new Four Seasons, the Trump International and the Shangri-La should be completed by 2012, at which point the city will have more than 1,000 new luxury rooms to rent. The big four will be considered five-stars, in the rankings of the hotel world. (Until now, Toronto's only five-star has been the two-year-old Hazelton Hotel in York�ville.) They come with altitude, ranging from 52 to 66 storeys."

read full story here
original source Toronto Life