About StayDigest

What we do

StayDigest reviews the casino hotels and casino resorts of Canada. We describe the casino floor — its size, its slot machines, its table games, its poker room and its high-limit salons — alongside the hotel, the restaurants, the theatre and the practical detail of getting there and staying the night. Then we score the whole thing out of ten and explain the number.

It is a travel publication about a particular kind of building. Casino hotels sit awkwardly between the hotel guides, which ignore the gaming floor entirely, and gambling sites, which ignore everything else. This digest covers both halves, because a reader deciding where to spend a weekend needs both.

What we are not

We are not a casino. We do not operate, own or manage any gaming venue, hotel or gambling facility. There is nothing to sign up for on this site, no games, no wagers, no deposits, no accounts and no offers. We do not run or promote online gambling of any kind, and we do not link readers to platforms that do.

We are also not affiliated with any property we write about. No operator has editorial input, advance sight of a review, or the ability to change a score. Where a property has corrected a fact, we correct the fact and leave the assessment where it stands.

How we review

Every property in the digest has been visited. Someone from the editorial side has walked the casino floor at a quiet hour and again at a busy one, stayed in the hotel where there is one, eaten at least one meal, and checked the things reviews usually skip: the queue at the cage, the walk from the car park, whether the sportsbook lounge has seats, how loud the room is at nine on a Saturday.

We record what is countable — floor area, slot machines, gaming tables, rooms, opening dates — from operator material, provincial regulators and our own observation, and we date every entry with the month it was last checked. These numbers move. A property that added forty machines last quarter has not changed in a way that should alter anybody's booking, but a property that closed its poker room has.

Four criteria are scored out of ten each and averaged into the headline number:

Editorial independence

Nothing on this site is paid placement, and no review has been given in exchange for access, hospitality or advertising. Where we accept industry information — a press release, a fact sheet, a corrected figure — it is treated as a claim to verify, not as copy to publish.

We publish in English for a Canadian readership, we follow Canadian privacy law in how we handle the little data this site collects, and we carry responsible gaming information on every page because it belongs there, not because a rule requires it.

Who writes it

StayDigest is produced by a small editorial team working out of Ottawa, with contributors in Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax who cover their own regions. Between them they visit each property in the digest at least once a year. Corrections, questions and press enquiries all reach the same desk: [email protected].