The Case for Fall at Abigail's Hotel

Allison Fairhurst • October 15, 2026

The Case for Fall at Abigail's Hotel

We finished this summer at nearly 98 per cent occupancy. It was the best season Abigail's Hotel has had, and it went by in a blur: full rooms almost every night, concerts downtown, a record year for cruise ships in the harbour.

Then Labour Day arrived and the pace changed.

Fall is the season we would choose for ourselves. September has been as busy as July here, and we are close to sold out through the third week of October, so an empty hotel has nothing to do with it. What changes is the rhythm. Guests sleep in. Breakfast stretches past nine. The fire in the library comes back.


A Slower Kind of Morning


You can feel the change the week after Labour Day. Our fall guests tend to be a little older, mostly couples, and many of them have deliberately skipped the heat and the crowds of high summer. They arrive without a packed island itinerary and without an eight o'clock whale watching booking. They come here to slow down.

It shows up first in the dining room. In July, breakfast runs on everyone else's schedule: early flights, boat departures, tour pickups. In October, guests come down when they wake up, and then they stay a while. The room is darker at eight in the morning. The flowers on the tables turn to autumn colours, because our florist works to the season and the arrangements are delivered fresh every week. The kitchen is calmer, because nobody is racing anyone to the door.


What Our Chef Does With Autumn


Our three-course gourmet breakfast changes every morning, which means it follows whatever Vancouver Island is growing. Chef Gerald is building the fall menu now, and it leans on root vegetables, squash, pumpkin and the warm spices that belong with them. We cook what is in season because that is when it tastes like something.

The holidays get their own treatment. On Thanksgiving, Gerald might put turkey eggs benedict on the menu, or roast a fresh turkey, or serve a good ham. At Christmas, it turns into a Christmas benedict or Bailey's French toast. There is something familiar about a turkey benedict in October. It is the sort of thing you would make at home with what was left from dinner the night before, and that is exactly the feeling we are after.

Evenings change too. Once the weather turns, our evening snack becomes fresh homemade soup, and you can usually smell it before you reach the dining room.


Rainy Days and the Library Fire


It rains here. That is part of the arrangement in the fall, and our guests tend to treat it as a feature.

Most of our rooms have a fireplace. The library has the last real wood-burning fire in the hotel, and we light it as soon as the mornings turn cold and dark. That is when the library earns its keep. Guests come down with a book, start a puzzle, pull out a board game, or put a game on the television and settle in for the afternoon.

There are weeks in October when we are full and we barely see anyone, because everyone is upstairs with the rain on the windows. We take that as a compliment. This is a 1930s Tudor mansion with thirty rooms, and on a wet afternoon it behaves far more like a house than a hotel.


Victoria in the Fall


October is a good month to be a visitor here. The ghost tours start running, Craigdarroch Castle leans into its haunted reputation, and the farms outside the city open their corn mazes and harvest festivals. November brings an international wine festival.

Butchart Gardens is open year round, and in the fall the Japanese Garden takes over from the rose garden as the reason to go. Hatley Castle has the same thing happening in its grounds. If you only know Victoria in June, you know it in one colour.

The weather helps. The coast stays mild long after the rest of the country has given up on the idea, and that is part of why we are seeing more long stays through the fall and winter. Canadians who once flew south are staying closer to home, and Victoria turns out to be an easy place to spend a week. We are still a short walk from the Inner Harbour, and the walk is better in October than it is in July.


Long Enough to Be Called by Your First Name


Summer stays are often one or two nights. Tour groups come through, guests see the harbour, and they move on. Fall is where the four and five night stays live, and some guests settle in for considerably longer than that.

That changes the service. By the third or fourth morning we know your name, and more usefully, we know which name you want us to use. Mr. and Mrs. Jones becomes Mike and Donna, usually because Donna has told us to stop calling her Mrs. Jones. We take our cue from the guest on that. Some of our most loyal return guests are still Mr. and Mrs. after years with us, which is exactly how they like it. With thirty rooms, we have the time to notice the difference.

We also field fewer requests in the fall, which says something about who comes. Many of our autumn guests already know Victoria. They are from the island, or they have stayed with us before, or they are here for a particular reason: a son or daughter at the university, a medical appointment downtown, a few days away that does not need an itinerary attached to it.


The Oak Tree Out Front


There is a large oak at the front of the hotel, and it is one of the last trees on the street to let go of its leaves. Before it does, it turns a red you can see from the end of the block.

"I love the dark mornings, and I don't mind the rain at all," says Allison Fairhurst, General Manager of Abigail's Hotel. "But that oak tree goes an absolutely vibrant red, and I just love looking outside and watching the leaves change. It reminds me of growing up in Nova Scotia, those east coast colours. We have that right here at the hotel."

The Japanese maples in the garden do the same thing. By the middle of November we are planning the Christmas decorations, and once the lights go up, locals walk over in the evenings to see them, the same way they stop by all year to look at the whale statue out front. There are deer in the gardens most of the season, and they are not in a hurry either.

Weekends fill here year round, so book early if a fall weekend is what you are after. Midweek is where this season rewards you. We hold a better rate from Sunday through Thursday, and better again for stays of two nights or more. Book directly with us, tell us what brings you to Victoria, and we will have the fire going.

What a Guest's Name Can Teach You About Running a Hotel

By Allison Fairhurst • August 14, 2026
People ask me all the time what changed the year we became Canada's #1 Hotel. They expect me to point to a renovation, or a marketing push, or some clever thing we did that the hotel down the street didn't think of. The honest answer is less exciting than that, and also, I think, more important. Nothing changed. We just kept doing the thing we have always done, which is pay close attention to the person in front of us. I know how that sounds. Every hotel on earth will tell you it cares about service. It goes on the website next to the stock photo of someone in a robe looking out at a view. So let me be specific about what I actually mean, because the specifics are the whole point. The coffee thing We have a guest who comes back every autumn. She takes her coffee a particular way, oat milk, no sugar, and she likes it waiting when she comes down rather than having to ask. The first year, someone on our team noticed and wrote it down. Now it is simply how her mornings go when she is with us. She has never once had to repeat herself. That is not a system. We did not buy software to do that. Somebody paid attention, cared enough to remember, and told the rest of the team so the knowing would outlast any one person's shift. Multiply that across 30 rooms and you start to understand what we are actually selling. It is not the fireplace or the breakfast, lovely as those are. It is the feeling of being known. You cannot really do that at scale. I want to be careful here, because I am not knocking the big hotels, they do things we could never do. But there is a reason the feeling of being recognized is rare, and the reason is math. When you have 800 rooms, the person at the desk cannot possibly know you. When you have 30, not knowing you starts to feel like a failure. The size is the strategy. We chose small on purpose, and we have never once regretted it, even on the nights when small means everyone pitches in to solve one guest's problem. Why the ranking followed Here is what I have come to believe after nearly a century of this hotel existing and quite a few years of me being the one worrying about it. The ranking is not the achievement. The ranking is the echo. Guests do not leave a glowing review because you asked them to at checkout. They leave it because something during the stay caught them off guard, in a good way. A returning guest whose anniversary we remembered. A couple who mentioned, in passing, that they were celebrating something, and came back to the room to find we had noticed. Those moments are what people write about. And enough of those moments, written down by enough people over enough years, is what a ranking actually is. So when we were named the best hotel in Canada, and then the seventh best in the world, the only Canadian hotel to land on that global list, I did not feel like we had won something. I felt like a lot of very small, very quiet acts of attention had finally added up in public.  What I would tell another hotelier If you run a small property and you are watching the big brands spend money you do not have, I understand the anxiety. We felt it too. But I would gently push back on the idea that you are at a disadvantage. Your smallness is the one thing they cannot buy back. The chains are spending enormous sums trying to make 800 rooms feel personal. You already have the thing they are chasing. The trap is thinking you need to act bigger to compete. You do not. You need to go the other direction, further into the personal, deeper into the details, harder into the parts of hospitality that only work when someone genuinely cares and is close enough to show it. Remember the coffee. Write it down. Tell your team. Do that a few thousand times and the rankings tend to sort themselves out. We are a 95-year-old Tudor mansion with 30 rooms in Victoria, and we are, for now, the seventh best hotel in the world. I still find that a little hard to say out loud. But I know exactly how we got here, and it fits on a notecard behind the front desk.