Great Canadian Casino Resort Toronto: the hotel beside Woodbine

The ranking / The ten / Great Canadian Casino Resort Toronto

5

See this hotel → opens the hotel's own site

Scores

• View18 / 30Racetrack View and City View categories are published, but the setting is less singular than falls, river or lake hotels.
• Room stock and categories19 / 25Named rooms include Premium, Racetrack, accessible rooms, Corner Suite and 2 Bedroom Suite, though official total inventory is unclear.
• Building and public spaces15 / 20The Theatre and large garage define the public complex; storeys, architect and detailed interior materials are not published.
• Newness and renovation15 / 15The 2023 hotel opening gives it one of the freshest building dates in the ten-hotel roster.
• Transparency of published facts5 / 10Room names, parking and theatre capacity are clear; room count, storeys, designer and hotel amenity detail are missing or secondary.

Why it ranks here

Great Canadian Casino Resort Toronto sits in the middle of this site’s ten-hotel order: newer than almost everything else, more explicit about room categories than several older resorts, but weaker on the elemental question of what the whole building is and how many rooms it actually contains. The resort’s own pages name room types and views, but the room-count figure is not published in the fact sheet we use for the ranking. That costs it under transparency.

The hotel’s advantage is freshness. The casino opened in its first phase on June 20, 2023 by secondary reporting, and the hotel opened on August 1, 2023 by the July 6, 2023 press release cited in FACTS. Among the ten profiles, only Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Ottawa is newer. For readers comparing age and renovation rather than inherited skyline, the broader guide to the newest buildings is the natural companion page.

The view proposition is narrower than at Niagara Falls, Windsor or Richmond. Official room names include City View and Racetrack View, and the hotel copy says that some rooms have “front-row views of the racetrack.” Destination Toronto’s listing says nearly half offer views of Woodbine Racetrack. That is a real view, but it is not a river, lake or falls. It is also a view whose quality depends heavily on which side and floor are assigned.

The score below follows how we score: view, room stock and categories, building and public spaces, newness or renovation, and transparency of published facts. Great Canadian Toronto benefits from date and category evidence; it loses ground because storeys, architect and a resort-published room count are not available in the FACTS set.

The building at the racetrack site

The address is 1133 Queens Plate Drive, Toronto, Ontario M9W 0G4. FACTS place the hotel entrance on Dance Smartly Boulevard, “just south of the Expansion Casino.” That wording matters because the resort is not a downtown tower hotel borrowing a casino at ground level. It is a racetrack-site development, set beside Woodbine Racetrack in north Etobicoke, with movement organized by road access, garage parking and shuttle rather than a walkable urban block.

The official pages publish no storey count and name no architect or designer. This profile therefore does not supply either. The building must be read from what the resort chooses to disclose: a hotel attached to a large entertainment and casino complex, with an enclosed, camera-monitored garage described as having 3,800 spaces. Official driving directions tell guests to approach from the west on Rexdale Boulevard and turn right at the Queen’s Plate Drive intersection. That is architectural context of a blunt kind, but it is useful. This is a car-arrival hotel first.

The site also publishes an airport relationship rather than a downtown one: it is “just minutes from Toronto Pearson Airport,” with a free daily airport shuttle listed in FACTS. Secondary press gives “about 15 minutes north of Toronto Pearson Airport.” No official downtown distance is published in the FACTS set, and no TTC route or stop is named on official pages. The window, then, is not a city-centre window. It is an airport-edge and racetrack-edge window.

In the wider comparison table, this separates Great Canadian Toronto from hotels whose setting does much of the work: Fallsview Casino Resort above the falls, Caesars Windsor on the riverfront, and River Rock Casino Resort by the Fraser.

Rooms, names and what the window promises

The resort publishes room categories with enough precision to be helpful. Standard-size rooms in FACTS are listed at 388 Sq Ft for Premium King, Racetrack King, Premium Two Queen, Racetrack Two Queen, Racetrack Accessible King and Premium Accessible Two Queen. Premium King and Premium Two Queen carry a City View label; Racetrack King is listed with a City View label on the page, while the category name itself points toward the track. Racetrack Two Queen and Racetrack Accessible King are named in the room list without the same level of view-description consistency.

The best reason to book carefully here is that the room names do real work. “Premium” and “Racetrack” are not interchangeable for this site’s purposes. The hotel copy says “some” rooms have front-row views of the racetrack. Destination Toronto’s listing says nearly half of the 400 guest rooms offer Woodbine Racetrack views, but that is not the same as a guarantee attached to every room. A guest who wants the racetrack should ask for the named category and for the desk to confirm that the assigned room faces the track.

The suite list is more useful than the building list. Corner Suite is offered as City View, Racetrack View or Accessible Corner Suites, with one king bed and one queen pull-out sofa, plus a refrigerator and microwave. The 2 Bedroom Suite sleeps up to six, with two separate bedrooms — either one king and one queen, or two queens — and one queen pull-out sofa in the living area. It also has a refrigerator and microwave. Official suite sizes are not published for these categories in the FACTS set.

Secondary press wording from 2023 says rooms “range from 400 square feet to 840 square feet” and describes prestige suites with a separate living room and fully equipped kitchenette with full-size fridge and microwave. Because that is secondary, it should not be treated like a current room-grid promise. The stronger booking evidence is the named category on the hotel’s own pages.

The Theatre as public architecture

The Theatre is the resort’s most legible public-space object. FACTS describe it as a 5,000-person venue, with 4,000+ capacity for concerts and 1,500+ for galas. For a hotel guest, this matters less as entertainment programming than as a building type attached to the bed: a large event box capable of changing the sound, arrival pattern and late-evening lobby traffic of the resort.

The venue gives Great Canadian Toronto more architectural weight than a room block and a parking garage would have alone. It also makes the resort comparable, in functional terms, with the large performance rooms at other Canadian casino hotels. It is not presented here as a reason to gamble; it is a reason to understand the building as an event hotel, where show nights and gala layouts may shape the experience of arriving, dining and sleeping.

The public-space facts otherwise remain selective. The resort lists dining names: Copperhorn steakhouse, Chopsticks Noodlehouse, Casual gastropub, Lobster Legend Noodle Bar, Pizzaiolo, Northern Lights Bar and Lobby Bar Grab & Go. The FACTS set does not provide interior materials, designer names or detailed hotel amenity descriptions. It also says hotel amenities were not detailed on the pages reached. A critic can describe the theatre’s capacity and the restaurant roster; anything more tactile would be embroidery.

Parking, by contrast, is well published. The resort lists free self-parking and 3,800 spaces in an enclosed, camera-monitored garage. This is not romantic information, but it is the kind of information that changes the arrival sequence. At Great Canadian Toronto, the public architecture begins with the road and garage before it reaches the lobby.

What the resort publishes, and what it does not

Great Canadian Toronto is unusually current but not unusually transparent. Its official pages supply address, phone lines, room names, several room sizes, selected views, the theatre’s capacity and parking details. They do not publish a storey count in the FACTS set. They do not name an architect or designer. The resort fact sheet says the room count is not published by the resort, even though other FACTS include room-category language and secondary or listing references to 400 guest rooms and suites.

This distinction is not pedantry. The ranking gives ten points for transparency because readers should know whether a number comes from the resort, a tourism listing, a press report or nowhere at all. A hotel that publishes a count, tower names, room grid and views is easier to compare. A hotel that only partly publishes these facts may still be a good place to sleep, but it asks the reader to do more confirmation work.

The casino facts are also partial. Official copy says the resort has the largest selection of slot machines in Canada and publishes high-limit area details: over 210+ slot machines, 15 multi-game electronic video poker and Blackjack games, and over 25 live table games. Secondary reporting from the June 2023 opening gives 4,800 slot machines and 145 table games. This site does not use those numbers as a reason to rank the hotel; they are noted only because they help define the scale of the property.

Ontario’s entry age is 19+, and this profile treats the casino as part of the building rather than a booking motive. Readers comparing provincial rules can use the by province page. Readers comparing only the hotel side should start with the room name, the desired side of the building and whether a theatre event is scheduled for the stay.

See this hotel on the official site, or ask the desk to check a racetrack-facing category before committing to dates.

Verdict

Best for a new racetrack-side stay, not for a landmark skyline.

See this hotel →