The Westin Calgary

Good things about the Westin:

Right downtown, great for business, connected to just about everything via the Plus 15 system.

Tip: Look for weekend and off-season specials at all of the downtown business hotels, as sometimes there are surprising deals, particularly if you can arrange your trip at the last minute. I see that on the Westin's website now they're offering a promo where you pay your birth year as the room rate for part of your stay. Hmmmm, that's one way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

The Westin Calgary is one of the city's best business hotels. It hosts a lot of conferences and major events. I haven't eaten there in a while but the food was always good when I was a regular.

There are some famous parties there during the Stampede (often charity fundraisers, not cheap but the tickets are very much sought-after).

The Caesar (vodka and Clamato juice, a twist on the Bloody Mary) was invented here.

My story about the Vancouver Canucks (well, one of them) in the lobby in 1990 might surprise you a bit. It was sort of surreal.

The Westin Calgary
320 - 4th Avenue SW
Calgary, Alberta
Canada
T2P 2S6

Phone: (403) 266-1611

One of the Starwood brand of hotels and resorts.

Vancouver Canucks at the Westin Hotel, Calgary (1990 or so)

It's not that all my Calgary hotel memories are this old (like my story of seeing the Queen at the Palliser), it's just that I think of them when certain hotels come to mind.

So here's a story that happened at the Westin, one of Calgary's top-end downtown business hotels.

Not being a hockey groupie, I'm not sure whether all the NHL teams stay at the Westin when they come to Calgary, but I suspect a lot of them do.

Sometime long ago, around 1990, I was a speaker at a business conference at the Westin. There was a dinner and I must have ducked out early, because I remember being almost alone in the lobby except for two other people. One was the bellman. The other was carrying a stuffed armadillo.

We don't see many armadillos this far north. None, in fact.

So, while I was trying to see the armadillo without staring, I completely missed noticing the guy carrying it. It was Igor Larionov, a Russian superstar centre who came to Canada in 1989 and played for the Vancouver Canucks for three years. Like I said, I'm not a hockey groupie. The bellman filled me in later. The Canucks had just played an exhibition game in Texas and had obligingly stopped over in Calgary for a beating by the Flames on the way home.

That is probably the most interesting thing I've seen at the Westin. And that's no small claim. For several years, my office faced the hotel and I was regularly treated to Calgary's own version of Ugly Naked Guy on the Road.