by Jen Mallia
Last updated: 11:35 AM ET, Thu May 1, 2025
For the first time since December, when a certain blonde pop mega-star sold out six concerts and skyrocketed hotel prices in the city, Toronto has reclaimed its title of Canadian city with the most expensive hotel rates.
According to data collected by CoStar, Toronto edged out Vancouver for the first time this year, with an average nightly rate of $242.30 in March, compared to metro Vancouver’s average of $216.26 per night.
That 12 percent price difference is significant enough to push Toronto to the top of the price ranking for year-to-date rates, despite the fact that Vancouver rooms were more expensive on average in January and February of 2025.
Although higher occupancy rates often go hand-in-hand with higher room prices, in March, this was not the case. While not the highest in the country (a distinction that went to Victoria, with an average occupancy per night of 77.2 percent) Vancouver held a higher spot for occupancy, at 72 percent, compared to Toronto’s 70.4.
One reason for the blip, posited by Business Intelligence in BC was that Toronto prices were driven up by the The Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada conference in early March, which hosted 27,000 people.
More Hotels in the Pipeline
More hotel rooms will be coming onto the market in the near future and further down the road in both cities.
Yahoo Finance reports that the first quarter of 2025 has reached record highs for hotel construction. The top three regions to benefit from all the new rooms are Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec, which together will hold 89 percent of the country’s rooms currently under construction and in the planning stages.
There are presently 71 hotel projects slated for Toronto which will result in 11,781 more rooms. Niagara Falls is another Ontario hotspot, with 20 projects that will result in 5,652 more rooms in the inventory.
Vancouver, where the destination marketing board has highlighted an urgent need for more hotel rooms, 33 projects and 7,004 rooms are in development. These figures reflect a substantial year-on-year growth of 5 percent in projects and 72 percent in rooms.
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