Just spent a fabulous Easter holiday in Banff and can't say enough great things about this family friendly hotel!

I was somewhat hesitant while reading previous reviews of this property as I had already booked my room through Expedia and didn't want to bother with the hassle of changing. We didn't seem to experience problems with heating, (although it was a cooler weekend) or cleanliness, although you could tell that they were still in the process of some renovations.

Our room was bright, airy and clean. The breakfast was good too, not a huge variety but my kids loved the waffles. The best part is that it was free! We also used the pool area and the staff were more than eager to assist! We will definately be back!

On a side note - we were dissapointed with the Banff Gondola. It seems very pricey for a quick ride up a mountain which isn't much more impressive than the view you get at any of the ski hills.

We stayed for 6 nights in March. This hotel is rated 3 stars by some of the large travel booking sites (e.g. Orbitz, Expedia, etc...). It should clearly be rated as a 2 star hotel at most and should not be considered equivalent to what most travelers consider 3 star choices (e.g. most decent Holiday Inns). If budget is your main concern then maybe this is your place but consider your options. This place has very old decor and poor ventilation. There are ancient wall-mounted air conditioners (we didn't need one in March but I wonder if they work) and as we found out, there is no way to control heat in the room so we ended up sleeping with the windows open to avoid roasting all night. If you are picking this place because of the free breakfast, don't. The breakfast was OK but very plain and the same exact thing every single day so you will be sick of it after a couple days. On the plus side the young folks providing the service were very helpful and it's just a short walk to downtown (but so are a lot of other hotels).

The best thing about the hotel was that it was in an excellent location, far enough from town to not get involved in the nightlife and close enough to walk into for shopping and eating etc. The girls at the front desk were extremely helpful, especially as we had lost luggage, and they constantly tried the airline for us so that we could continue with our snowboarding throughout the day!
The rooms were a bit strange in lay out. We were sharing with friends and instead of having two seperate bedrooms and a living/kitchen area, there was a double bed in the living/kitchen(not literally) area and another bedroom off to the side. Which kinda made privacy a bit strange as we had to walk through our friends bed area to get to the other bedroom, or if we wanted to use the living/kitchen in the evening it meant that we were in their 'bedroom'...kinda weird....must be a Canadian thing! But that was the only real problem.
Breakfast was very good, filled up on waffles(very tasty!), cereal and toast every morning, and they had takeaway cups, plates etc so u could grab something to go.
The swimming pool was a good way to relax after a long days snowboarding too, but there was probably a little too much chlorine...but hey,now I'm just being picky!
All in all a very the stay was comfortable and would stay again.

We stayed at this hotel from February 19th - 25th 2007. We had 2 rooms which were opposite each other with a door to the corridor that you could close and lock. This worked well for us with our two sons. The rooms were okay - bathrooms very small but plenty of clean towels. The main problem was with the keys. Every key we were given would work once and then stop working leaving you standing outside your room endlessly swiping the key before giving in and going back to reception for another key. On the second day I spoke to the hotel manager who was very helpful and said she would have the locks looked at. Although they did this it made no difference at all and the problem continued. At first the staff were very helpful but as the week wore on, they were obviously frustrated that they could not solve the problem and became rude and unhelpful to us - one receptionist even telling me he lived in the hotel and had no problem with his key. As we were guests paying for a room we could not get into this was both rude and made the frustration even worse. They suggested that the problem was our sons getting new keys which they said invalidated the original keys. We kept explaining that the original keys only worked once but felt that the staff were not really interested. We had other friends staying in the hotel and they too experienced problems with keys. We also noticed on our many trips to reception that there were other people complaining about keys. This is a shame as for the money the hotel was okay and an easy walk into town. However we would not stay there again. It was also very noisy with freight train whistles going right through the night. We spent our second week at the Rimrock Resort which was absolute bliss and thoroughly recommended.