This 1965 brochure pictures and describes seven chateau-style hotels, three plainer urban hotels built in the early 20th century, and two motor lodges. The brochure also describes two high-rise modernist hotels then under construction, one in Edmonton scheduled to open and one in Montreal scheduled to open in 1967. But Canadian Pacific owned several other hotels at the time, including the Cornwallis Inn in Nova Scotia, and the 1939 Hotel Vancouver, perhaps the last chateau-style hotel built, which CP owned jointly with rival CN.
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The hotels described in this brochure ranged in size from 50 rooms in the modernist Timberline Hotel in Banff (now the Juniper Hotel to more than 1,600 rooms in Toronto’s Royal York Hotel, once the largest hotel in the British Commonwealth. The brochure also briefly describes five Rocky Mountain lodges with other owners but “reached by Canadian Pacific.”
Unlike American railroads, which got out of the hotel business by the time Amtrak took over passenger trains in 1971, Canadian Pacific remained an enthusiastic hotel proprietor long after it stopped running passenger steamships, trains, and planes. In 1999, it purchased an American chain of hotels named after the Fairmount San Francisco Hotel. With more than 100 hotels in 19 countries, it decided to rename its hotel line Fairmount Hotels and Resorts to minimize any stigma of foreign ownership for its many international hotels.
Despite the profitability of the hotel chain, in 2001 Canadian Pacific Limited decided it could maximize shareholder value by spinning off its various operations into separate companies: Fairmont Hotels, PanCanadian Energy, Fording Coal, CP Ships, and of course Canadian Pacific Railway. Trucking and telecommunications divisions had already been shut down or sold to other companies.