Pacific Northwest Hotel Guide: Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise's Lake View

Where: 111 Lake Louise Drive, Lake Louise, AB, Canada, T0L 1E0

July 16, 2008 at 9:00 AM | by Tim L. | 0 Comments

HotelChatter contributing editor Tim Leffel wraps up his jaunt around British Columbia and Alberta in Canada, seeing the hotel scene from a family travel perspective. All prices are in Canadian dollars--which currently trade slightly higher than U.S. dollars. Enjoy.

Like the Moraine Lake Lodge ten minutes away, the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise has one of Canada's most spectacular settings all to itself. In this case it's Lake Louise, a stunning blue glacier lake surrounded by dramatic peaks topped by ice that's been there since the Wooly Mammoth days.

But while Moraine Lake Lodge is an intimate experience, this hotel is built to serve the throngs of visitors it knows it will receive all summer. When we were there six of the seven sit-down restaurants were all booked up during prime dinner hours.

Most of the staff for this 550-room hotel needs to be imported and housed, so service can be inconsistent, but the lake, the facilities, and the activities easily make up for it. There's hiking and canoeing in the summer and skiing in winter. Our little one especially liked the on-site stables, where we could book a guided horseback ride to the other end of the lake and back.

The best rooms are in the Fairmont Gold section, where besides the breakfast and lounge privileges you get a Bose CD player, more toiletries, a 37-inch flat screen TV, and complimentary wireless Internet access. (No mercy on the parking fee though, which is $32 a day.)

Rates start around $279 for the smallest rooms with no lake view in the low season, but can easily top $500 for a deluxe one with a good view during summer or the height of ski season.

But hey, for a setting like this where there's just one grand hotel, sometimes you have to splurge.

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