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Kingston is centrally located on Highway 401 between Toronto and Montreal. Exit Highway 401 at Sir John A. Mac Donald Blvd. South – four traffic lights to Princess St. Then right to our location. (5 minutes from 401). The Fireside Inn is only minutes from downtown, close to shopping and Kingston’s many attractions, with ample free parking on premises. Your perfect location for business or pleasure.
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Ottawa Citizen
-Saturday December 15, 1990-
"Weekend Travel – FANTASY SUITES" Tony Lofaro – Citizen Travel Writer
If TV host Robin Leach ever drops in on Kingston, he’d stay at the Best Western Fireside Inn.
The Cockney-accented host of LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH & FAMOUS would feel right at home in any of the hotel’s four fantasy suites, but especially the Lords and Ladies room.
It has a Beefeater standing guard in a wooden booth, a cozy sitting area with dark wood furniture and red leather chairs, a painting of an old English castle on a back wall and a bed inside a 1976 Silver Shadow Edition Rolls Royce.
Yes, a Rolls Royce. No replica here, it’s the real thing. And yes, that’s a bed occupying the space usually taken by the front and rear seats, visible because the Rolls’s roof has been cut away. The mattress ranks as the most comfortable ever placed on top of a bed frame, my wife and I agreed after a recent Saturday night spent between the Rolls’s doors.
The Best Western on Kingston’s busy Princess Street – a major city roadway dotted by fast food outlets, motels and shopping malls – would seem to be an unlikely spot for such luxurious quarters.
But venture behind the hotels exterior barn board and heavily landscaped entrance, and you’ll enter a fantasy world.
The hotel spent almost a year and considerable money (management is mum on the actual dollar figure) extensively renovating its former squash and racquetball courts into four separate fantasy suites. Each has its own theme and appeal.
It’s the sort of stuff you’d expect to find in some of the outlandish Las Vegas and Poconos hotels. But this Best Western has gone for class, not crass.
Borrowing on familiar movie themes and images, the suites include Susie Wong (an Oriental theme based on The World Of Susie Wong), Tranquility Base (based on the James Bond movie Moonraker), Flights Of Fantasy (Around The World In Eighty Days) and Lord and Lady (from the cross-country car race movie The Great Race). Videotapes of copies of these movies can be found next to the VCR in the rooms.
The suites are all spectacular.
In the three-storey Flights of Fantasy room, a massive hot-air balloon soars to the ceiling. Guests sleep in the basket beneath the balloon and can enjoy a private sauna and a 66- by 44-inch TV.
In the Tranquility Base room, an astronaut dangles from a white cable set against a jet-black ceiling and moulded rock walls. The bed is the base of a towering spaceship looming ominously in the two-storey suite.
The Lord and Lady room is an English treat, reserved, dignified and lavish without being gaudy.
Even the more simple Susie Wong suite, with Oriental fans and vases and gorgeous furnishings, has elegance and charm.*
Frommers Canada
-13th edition-
"The Best Western Fireside Inn"
Put aside preconceptions about hotels with the Best Western logo.
The lounge off the lobby looks like a Yukon cabin, with log siding, a moose head, and wing chairs. Every room has a gas fireplace, Canadian pine furnishings, and an unstocked fridge.
Spring for a fantasy suite and your bed might be in a real Rolls-Royce, in the basket of a 2 1/2-story-high hot air balloon, or in a simulated "Tranquility Moon Base." Lesser suites have whirlpools next to the fireplaces.
Even the most ordinary rooms trump most big-city hotels for comfort"… "equipped with puffy quilts, sofas, and shelves of old books.
The Bistro Stefan is unexpectedly capable.*
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