Is the Hilton Bonaventure hotel in a good location?
 

for shopping, good restaurants, city walking?

Yes, it is fine.

BAK

I stayed there for 4 nights in May and thought the location was excellent. Very easy to walk to lots of places in the city from here but with very easy access to the Bonaventure metro station if you don't feel like walking or are travelling further afield.

The Bonaventure is not in an awful location, but it's not really a great location. It's a 5-15 minute walk to most of the places you'd most want to be: Old Montreal, shopping on St Catherine, or the galleries on Crescent St area. If you wanted to be closer to Old Montreal and stay in an upscale, full-service hotel, better choices might be the InterContinental or the St James.

Still, the Hilton is not a bad place, and its outdoor garden is a particularly pleasant place when the weather is nice.

I agree with rizzuto's assessment of the location of the Hilton Bonaventure.

BTW, be careful that they do not try to stick you with a room overlooking the parking lot...that happened to us once. We demanded a change to the garden-view rooms, and got it.

As for me, I prefer a hotel closer to Ste. Catherine, like Hotel de la Montagne or Vogue (depending on budget at the time!)

Not everyone would necessarily want a garden-view room. There's a walking path that goes through the garden, so you do lose a certain amount of privacy with the garden-view room (anyone strolling through the garden will be just a few feet outside your window).

We were not thrilled with the Bonaventure Hilton. The location was not as convenient as we expected. It's UPHILL to St. Catherine and quite the hike to the metro platform even though it's right under the hotel. Walking back to the hotel late at night - well the area is deserted.

It was discouraging that all the shops and dining/coffee concessions connected to the hotel/metro had "business hours" so were never open evenings.

We had to change rooms twice to get one with a decent view. The decor in all was quite drab and toward quite shabby. Housekeeping was far from meticulous. Hot water/pressure was not adequate.

It was astonishing that most of the time the "gardens" were not accessible. Hours were odd in the restaurants and bars. We returned at 10:30 one evening only to find the bar closed.

Service, EXCEPT for the delightful folks at the concierge desk and the doormen, throughout the hotel was perfunctory and stiff.

We always stay at Hotel de la Montagne but it was full for this impromptu trip. I booked the Bonaventure with Priceline (my only real Priceline disappointment ever - even for the ridiculously low rate).

Noelle, back to your question.

There is no need to walk uphill. Just cross the street to the railway sation, walk though the station past some great food stores and takeout restaurants, and take the escalator up to the entrance to the shopping area at Place Ville Marie.

From here there are tunnels and malls and walkways, supported when needed by escalators, to hundreds of good shops.

You can get out onto the street, and yes, Montreal is built on a mountain -- that's where the name comes from, so you have to walk uphill to Holt Renfrew.

If you stay in Old Montreal, it's a long walk back to the downtown core. If you stay on Sherbrooke Street, where there are lots of good hotels, it's an even longer walk back to Old Montreal.

When I lived in Montal we had free parking at the Bonaventure, and it was a fine place to leave the car for lots of visits to downtown Montreal.

And in the summer, evening walks in Montreal are just fine.

To get back to the hotel in the eveing, you can, once again, walk through the Queen Elizabeth Hotel and/or Place Vuille Marie, both of which have security guards and security television systems, and then cut rhough the station to Place Bonaventure and the Hilton.

Or you can stay somewhere else, and walk in different directions.

But from the fHilton, theres a 270 degree arc of interest. Not much to the south west of the hotel.

BAK