Hoteles Canopy by Hilton en Toronto

I’m a big fan of the Canopy brand in general, but I have a hard time loving this particular Canopy. It seems like it’s designed more to look great than to be great. For example, the electric controls next to the bed are unnecessarily complicated— there’s about 9 buttons to control different lights and shades and things, and it isn’t easily usable. You have to hunt through all of them and try to remember the difference between the sconce light and the halo. It’s needlessly complex and that makes it harder to use. There is also a motion-activated night light under the bed, so if you get up in the middle of the night, it shines a light for you, which isn’t great if your partner if sleeping or even if you yourself want to try to go back to sleep. The night light is hyper sensitive, so it activates even if you just lay in bed and dangle your leg down. And there’s no way to disable it. If you don’t want lights going off every time you get out of bed, you have to shove a pillow under the bed to block the motion sensor or cover up the light. I love the filtered water/ice stations (one of my favorite parts about canopy hotels!) but the ones I used here seemed a lot more temperamental than others. You have to hold your water bottle at exactly the perfect angle before water will dispense, but since there’s no instructions, you have to poke around til you figure it out. There’s no little shelf in the shower stall, so if you bring your own toiletries, you have to either put them on the shower floor or balance them on top of the wall-mounted toiletry bottles. I also didn’t love that there’s no door on the bathroom and only frosted glass around the toilet cubicle. The bed was great — very comfy — and the blackout shades were an excellent touch. Very convenient location, close to the subway. And the decor is beautiful, very sleek and bright. It just all feels like it was designed without any context of how a guest will actually interact with all these things.