Canadian Pacific Hotels - Final Expansion

Final Expansion

CPR's rival Grand Trunk Railway and later Canadian National Railway copied Van Horne's approach by building hotels such as the Jasper Park Lodge in Jasper, Alberta, and the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa. CPR purchased CN's hotel chain in 1988, making Canadian Pacific Hotels and Resorts (CP Hotels) the nation's largest hotel owner. In the 1990s, CP Hotels began to expand and purchased the Canadian Delta Hotels chain and the international Princess Hotels chain in 1998, which became wholly owned subsidiaries of CP Hotels. The following year in 1999 the company underwent a significant expansion in its international holdings when it purchased the San Francisco-based Fairmont Hotel chain, gaining control of famed hotels as The Plaza in New York City.

In 2001, parent Canadian Pacific Limited underwent a reorganization and renamed its Canadian Pacific Hotels and Resorts subsidiary as Fairmont Hotels and Resorts, borrowing the name of the company it had purchased in 1999. The newly organized Fairmont company shuffled several properties to its Delta subsidiary, while maintaining many original "signature" resorts and hotels from Fairmont and CP Hotels under the new Fairmont banner. Later that year in October 2001, Canadian Pacific Limited spun off all of its subsidiary companies into separately traded "independent" companies, including Canadian Pacific Railway and Fairmont Hotels and Resorts.

On 30 January 2006, Fairmont agreed to be acquired by a venture of Kingdom Hotels International and Colony Capital, which will combine it with the Raffles and Swissotel chains.