ECONO LODGE INN & SUITES DOWNTOWN

The hotel is perfect. The price of the room is perfect. The staff are perfect. The breakfast is great. I toast the raisin bagels and slather butter on them with a fresh banana. There is plenty of hot water for making tea. The place is clean and the rooms well heated or cooled (a large modern unit in the room below the window). The only way you could hear noise outside is if you stuck your head out the window. And the area is not all that noisy for a major downtown intersection. It would be disingenuous to complain about noise in the center of a large city like Toronto. The people who live and frequent the area (including the lovely Allen Gardens plant conservatory across the street) are wonderful. Some are down on there luck, some crazy, some eccentric some just tourists like me. Toronto is a pathetic city but the Econo Lodge is an exception that makes the city much more bearable.

This hotel is easy walk to all the fun areas of downtown Toronto. Not far from public transit and restaurants. Unfortunately it does not have a elevator so dragging luggage to the 3rd floor was a challenge. And the main door card reader was not functioning, but they were getting that looked into

I would stongly recommend you avoid this hotel. We would never go back there, you couldnt pay me to stay there again.... Here is why: 1. The hotel is in a very rough area, at night you are in a red light district and the noise outside is unbearable. You wont get any rest until gone 3am in the moring. Good entertainment to just sit at the window and watch the dram unfold outside, but it you want to sleep, forget it. 2. the heating in the hotel has a serious problem. The first night we were freezing, wrapping the bed with towels and wearing 3 sets of clothes. We didnt sleep at all the first night. The second night, the heating was so high and hot we had to keep the window open. even with -12 outside we had a job to remove the heat. 3. the hotel is not at all how it looks on the pictures, it is extremely old fashoned, dated, tatty and grubby. They have some good photographs but the hotel does not represent the pictures in any capacity. we had to look at the advert again because we couldnt believe we where in the right place 4. All the room share bathrooms. and there are very few of them. The bathrooms are horrible. There were tiles on the floor broken so watch your feet as you will get cut. The hot/cold water is sparadic and there is no inbetween. Everything seems to be broken (taps, toilet seat etc). The worst part is in the morining everyone is fighting to have a shower and you can wait 40 mins to get in there. By then someone has taken a nice big dump and the place stinks. 5. the breakfast is a joke, forget the breakfast it is a total waste of time. There are not enough seats and tables to fit everyone, all you have is bread and jam. Coffee is horrible and no tea bags. So after you get into this tiny, grubby room, you can have a hot/cold shower in an old sticky shared bathroom (if you can get in). then you can lay thre all night either freezing cold or boiling hot listening to the nightclubs, strip clubs and hookers outside until 3 am. But not to worry because in the moring you have a toast and jam waiting for you whilst your stood up looing for a seat. There were a lot more problems with this place but i dont want to write a book.