The Explorers Society Hotel

The Explorers Society Hotel opened in 2017 in the McKinnon Block, a 1911 building in Revelstoke's downtown heritage district that had never previously been a hotel. Its nine wood-trimmed rooms are backed by a rooftop guest lounge with a hot tub, secure gear storage with a drying system, and two in-house venues, the Quartermaster Eatery and the Boiler Room. It was the property that brought the boutique format to Revelstoke, a decade before the town's first luxury lodge.

The place

The hotel occupies 111 First Street West, in the heritage core of downtown Revelstoke — a compact grid of early twentieth-century brick and stone commercial blocks built when the town was a Canadian Pacific Railway divisional point. Everything in the centre is within a few minutes on foot, and the Revelstoke Mountain Resort gondola is a short drive south. This is emphatically a town-centre hotel rather than a mountain-base one.

The concept

The Explorers Society occupies the McKinnon Block, a 1911 building in Revelstoke's heritage district that had never operated as a hotel before — this is a conversion of a commercial block, not the rebranding of an existing inn. The Jenkins family took on the restoration and opened the property in 2017, and local press at the time framed it as the arrival of the boutique format in a town whose accommodation had until then run to motels, condominium rentals and base-area lodges. The scale is deliberately small: nine rooms, each finished with wood trim and restored period detailing, all double occupancy and configurable as a king or extra-long twins. What lifts it above a well-restored guesthouse is the specification around the rooms, which reads as though it were written by skiers — a rooftop guest lounge, part indoor and part outdoor, with a hot tub; secure gear storage with a drying system; and secure parking. Nine keys means the hotel cannot absorb a group of any size, and it has never tried to. It arrived a decade before Cabot's 155-room lodge and still represents the opposite proposition in the same town.

Dining & wellness

The building houses Quartermaster Eatery, a fine-dining restaurant built around steak, seafood and a rotisserie, and the Boiler Room, a small concealed space used for private dining and whisky. Wellness is limited to the rooftop hot tub; there is no spa.