Canadian Pacific hotels weren’t just places for tourists to stay. Most of them also had facilities for large conferences and conventions. This booklet is specifically aimed at attracting convention business to the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec.

Click image to download a 6.6-MB PDF of this 16-page booklet.

The booklet has a distinctly more modern, or perhaps business-like, appearance than booklet Canadian Pacific used to advertise the hotel to tourists. For example, this 1937 booklet from the Chung Collection emphasizes Quebec’s long history. In contrast, the second word on page 2 of the convention booklet is “modern.” (The Chung Collection, incidentally, also has a 1935 edition of the convention booklet.)

Although the booklet indicates that the chateau offered several possible meeting rooms, it only has a photograph of one of them, which is identified as the “convention hall.” The list of meeting rooms doesn’t have a “convention hall” and none of the rooms on the list seem to about the size of the room in the photo. But I suppose this isn’t too important 85 years later.

More concerning to me is that the photograph of a “typical bedroom” looks plain and uncomfortable. The photo of the “Habitant Suite” looks more attractive, but there were only a few such suites available. I suppose the twin beds in each photo were meant to imply that the rooms could be shared by two businessmen or conventioneers, but the typical bedrooms look more like a hospital than a hotel. Presumably they have been updated since 1937.