It has taken me a year to find the means to write the following hotel review, simply because the style of service at the Courtyard on Yonge Street in Downtown Toronto was neither noteworthy nor notable. Any run of the mill reader can interpret this comment as a negative one, but my experience over here was of indifference rather than anything else.

 

Downtown Toronto is at its best when one gets there by subway - it's just simply easier to leave the car at home, with the lousy parking rates and the snarling traffic. It's a great escape for those without proper vacation time. A weekend away in a great city is probably the best vacation that I've taken so far, and I've been to three continents.

 

The purpose of my stay last August was just that - a gateway out of the drab, boring suburbs, with a couple of my great friends that date back from prehistoric, secondary school times. We reserved a room in a higher floor of the building (it's the biggest Courtyard in the Marriott chain), which they have glorified as the "prestige floor"; the room had two, queen-sized beds and a good-sized television as well.

 

They had just begun to offer free internet service to customers, so that was probably a nicety that was worth mentioning (they charged a lot for per-day internet use in the earlier years of this decade).

 

Our weekend wasn't very notable either: a dinner in the hotel restaurant, followed by a Blue Jays game at the Rogers Centre on the Sunday morning after. The dinner itself was not spectacular, but the service was completely notable - a Russian-accented waiter told us that our hour-and-a-half wait, after ordering, was justified due to the "higher than normal demand due to the intense rain".

 

The lemon slice that came with our alcohol had a small fruit fly, and the restaurant was about to close by the time we ate. The notable dinner at the hotel restaurant was over a hundred dollars, which was not worth the wait, nor the food that was served.

 

Now, a good point. A good point... well, they had a nice, clean room considering that the building was a few decades old. The beds were well made and the view was... at least adjacent to Yonge Street. We were also given late check-out by asking nicely, which adds to the mostly good experience.

 

The elevators at this hotel were a little small, although it had a nice bit of wallpaper that was reminiscent of a news broadcast from the 1990s. I will have to admit that we did take a couple of photos whilst inside. Our "prestige floor" seemed to lack prestige as it looked like the rest of the building - walls covered white, with standard furniture and other elements.

 

They also have an exercise room and swimming pool, so it's a great place to relax after being a tourist in your own city. Even the exercise equipment had its own televisions built in and all the supplies were there for a good workout (including a water cooler - that translates to double marks in my notebook).

 

The best part of the Courtyard by Marriott Downtown Toronto is its staff at the front desk. They were polite, pleasant, and straightforward to deal with. No surprises, no problems.

 

The hotel bill for one nights' stay along with the restaurant charges was just over three hundred dollars, but you should intrepret this amount depending on what you can spend downtown in the first place. The service was mostly pleasant, but the hotel restaurant should try harder for the money that one could spend there.

 

In all, it was a hotel that was not notable. Simply not notable. But not in a negative sense.