Location is the headline act here. Fairmont Chicago sits on Columbus Drive in the Loop with Millennium Park effectively across the street, which puts Cloud Gate, the Art Institute, the lakefront trail and the Riverwalk all within a ten-minute walk. For a first visit to Chicago it is hard to be better placed, and the upper floors bank the dividend with big views over Lake Michigan, the park and the skyline.
The hotel is a large one, 687 rooms across a 1980s tower, and it wears its convention-hotel scale openly: the lobby hums with name badges midweek and wedding parties at weekends. Rooms are generously cut by downtown standards, with picture windows, marble bathrooms and a recent, warm refurbishment; lake-view categories are the ones to chase. Fairmont Gold adds a lounge with the usual breakfast-and-canapes rhythm.
Toro by Chef Richard Sandoval brings pan-Latin cooking and a good bar to the ground floor, there is a spa and a 24-hour gym, and the concierge desk is unusually good at theatre tickets and museum timing. What you give up is intimacy; what you get is a polished machine within strolling distance of nearly everything that makes Chicago worth visiting. On balance, and especially at the rates it often trades at, that is a deal we would take.
