How we read plans
One question, three blocks, and a date saying when the sources were opened.
A hotel can be described in many ways. This guide picks one and keeps to it: which way the building is turned. Direction is a fact of the plan, decided once when the walls went up, and it explains more about a stay than a list of features does.
It also travels well. A reader who has never been to Lapland or to Santorini can still picture a long glass side held over water, or a wall of rock a metre behind the bed.
The first block says how the main body of the building sits and where its front is. The second says what stands on that side. The third says what is left at the back, which is usually the road, the yard or the hill the building was cut into.
The three blocks are not allowed to repeat each other. If the same sentence would work in two of them, one of them is wrong.
We do not give bearings in degrees and we never say that one side is worth asking for. We have not surveyed anything, and a compass reading would suggest a precision that is not there.
For the same reason there is nothing here about the evening light, the way it falls through a particular window, or which room to request. Those are claims about a stay, not about a plan.
The last text cell of every entry carries one line under this heading. It is a piece of preparation, not a complaint: a transfer to arrange, a road to check, a piece of clothing to bring, a question to ask before the day of arrival.
It never invents a fault. If we do not know of anything to prepare, the line says something practical about getting there instead.
The final line of an entry gives a month and a year. That is when the published sources behind the entry were opened, nothing more.
Buildings are altered, operators change and names change with them. The date lets you judge how old the reading is before you rely on it.
Published sources: hotel and operator websites, architects' drawings and published plans, maps, aerial imagery and photographs that have been published.
We do not publish accounts of staying anywhere, and no entry should be read as a report from a visit. Where a name or an operator looked uncertain, we used the current published name and said so in our own notes.
No prices, no star grades, no ratings or scores, no booking, no availability, no opening hours, no schedules and no paid placement. We take no commission and we do not pass enquiries to hotels. Nobody can buy an entry, a change to an entry, or a place on the sheet.
Four of the eighteen are Canadian resorts that happen to contain a casino. They are on the sheet because they are large buildings with a clear decision about direction, and three of them keep their front to water.
The gaming floor is not described and not assessed. There is nothing here about odds, wins, bonuses, betting or loyalty schemes, and no links to gaming sites or applications. Those entries carry no photograph of their own; a text cell stands in its place.