OverviewThe St. Lawrence Residence and Suites is located on the west side of Jarvis Street between Queen Street East and King Street East in Toronto, Ontario.
Facilities at the hotel include a communal kitchen and coin laundry. The front desk is open Monday to Friday from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM and Saturdays from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM. On Sundays and holidays the front desk is closed but self check-in is available for guests who arrive outside of the front desk's hours of operation.
The hotel offers a mixture of dorm beds and private rooms and amenities at the property include wireless Internet (a small fee applies), free local calls, irons, ironing boards, and hair dryers. Guests that do not have bathrooms in their rooms will have to use shared bathrooms at the hotel, facilities that also include private showers.
Guests interested in long termed stays may benefit from mailbox service and deep freezers. Parking is not available at the hotel however there are private lots in the area ($10 to $20 per day).
The GoodThere was only a small volume of reviews online for this hotel and the huge majority of them were from upset guests who disliked the property.
Some good points could be found as some guests stated or implied that they found the room rates or bed rates to be affordable. For example one guest said the hotel was the "best quality/price place in Toronto."
Some guests also appreciated the hotel's downtown location that was described as close to "Yonge and Dundas." Another guest said that the hotel was "less than 5 min walking to the city hall and all touristic places in Toronto."
Additionally the hotel had kitchen facilities that helped some travelers.
The Bad
The small volume of reviews that were available online for this hotel were dominated by negativity and emotionally bitter guests. Needless to stay, complaints were quite common and they varied across a broad spectrum.
Multiple guests claimed or suggested that they were victims of unjustified credit card charges after their stay. One guest offered this warning: "never give your credit card information to the owner of this crappy hotel. He will rip you apart." The guest also claimed that the owner "charged...100s of dollars claiming telephone charges !!!"
Other guests wrote about possibly related experiences. For example, one patron warned about a "hidden charge to your credit card" and another guest who claimed to have cancelled his reservation indicated that he was still charged "not once but twice." Another guest mentioned a similar scenario where he noticed that a member of the staff "attempted to charge (him) twice for the same booking."
The staff at the hotel were often described as rude and the manager was not spared from these assertions. In fact sometimes the manager interacted with reviewers using reply options that some review sites have afforded to hotel employees.
While explaining how the supply and demand of hotel rooms affects prices in downtown Toronto the manager offered the following unfriendly statements as a retort to an unhappy guest: “we all know as we move away from downtown, it inversely affects the rates. If you go far enough, that you get to your own home, you can stay there at no charge.”
Many guests felt that this hotel was downtrodden - or a "NIGHTMARE" as one guest put it - while another patron called the hotel a "dump" or a "joint". The heating didn't work according to many guests and a lack of cleanliness seemed to be a problem as well.
TripAdvisor.com ranked the hotel 36th of 46 specialty lodges in Toronto and the site had 22 reviews.
CanadianHotelGuide.com guest ratings average to 4.9 points out of 10 and the site had 6 reviews.
Google Places had just one review and the guest gave the hotel one star of five possible.
Notes: many sites do not have reviews for this hotel. No answer from the hotel's phone line.
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Analyzed by Shane L.
With ample personal travel experience and years of professional hotel work experience, Shane is prepared and determined to help travelers find what they want when booking Canadian hotels.
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