The skyline of a large North American city photographed across a wide river, with tall office towers and a moored riverboat on the far bank

Independent guide · Windsor, Ontario

Windsor Play & Stay

A guide to the riverfront resort at the top of downtown Windsor, written by people who have no rooms to sell and take no money from anyone.

Photograph: a city skyline seen across a river, by ROBERT MORROW via Pexels. Illustrative only — it is not a photograph of any hotel or venue named on this site.

Windsor Play & Stay is a reader's guide to a single decision: whether to spend the night at the riverfront resort at the top of downtown Windsor, and what you are actually walking into if you do. The resort is Caesars Windsor. We are not it. We take no bookings, hold no rooms, sell nothing, and accept no money from anyone we write about.

Windsor is an odd gambling town, because the skyline everyone photographs belongs to another country. Stand on the Detroit River and the towers on the far bank are in Michigan. Caesars Windsor sits on the Canadian side of that water at 377 Riverside Drive East, and a large share of its visitors crossed an international border to get there — a fact that shapes everything from the queue at the front desk to what you need in your pocket.

The one property in this guide

Caesars Windsor is owned by the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) and run by Caesars Entertainment Windsor Limited as OLG's service provider for what OLG calls the Windsor Gaming Bundle. In May 2025 OLG re-selected Caesars under a new agreement of roughly twenty years, with the transition expected in early 2026. That ownership structure matters more than it sounds: the gaming floor answers to an Ontario Crown corporation and to the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO), not to a private operator alone.

758guest rooms, in two towers

100,000 sq ftgaming floor, spread over two levels

5,000seats in The Colosseum theatre

Freeself-parking, 24 hours, in the attached garage

Those four numbers are the ones we could stand behind. Several others that circulate widely — how many slot machines are on the floor, how many table games, how much meeting space the building holds — we have left out, because our sources disagree with each other by hundreds of units. A guide that repeats a confident number it cannot support is worse than a guide that admits the gap.

What the city gives you around it

The property stands in the downtown core, on the same riverfront as the city's signature park system. Dieppe Gardens sits at the foot of Ouellette Avenue, downtown's main north–south street. The Windsor Sculpture Park runs along the Detroit River between the Ambassador Bridge and Festival Plaza, an open-air gallery rather than a building. Further east, Willistead Manor — a 1906 mansion at 1899 Niagara Street, owned by the city — is the grandest building in Windsor that has nothing to do with gambling.

Three crossings connect Windsor to Detroit. The Ambassador Bridge is a privately owned toll suspension bridge. The Detroit–Windsor Tunnel opened in 1930 and remains the only underwater international vehicle crossing anywhere; it runs 24 hours. The Gordie Howe International Bridge opened to vehicle traffic on 27 July 2026: six lanes and a cable-stayed main span of 853 m, managed by the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority. Its separate multi-use path for people on foot and on bicycles opened on 5 August 2026 and carries no toll.

A busy downtown street in a Canadian city, with brick low-rise buildings, shops, parked cars and pedestrians on a sunny afternoon — Illustrative stock photograph, not a picture of any place named on this page. A downtown street scene used here to set the tone of a walkable Canadian city centre; it was not photographed in Windsor.

Three things that changed recently

The Ariius nightclub left the building in January 2026. It had operated inside the resort since December 2015 and moved to 576 Ouellette Avenue in downtown Windsor. Its final weekend on site was 29–31 January 2026. Any guide still listing it as an on-property venue is out of date.
The operating agreement was renewed. OLG re-selected Caesars Entertainment Windsor Limited in May 2025 for a term of about twenty years.
A new border crossing opened. The Gordie Howe International Bridge took its first vehicles on 27 July 2026, changing the arithmetic for anyone driving in from Michigan.

Where to go next

The property in full — address, ownership, what is on site, and an honest read on who it suits.
The gaming floor — size, the poker room, entry rules, and the numbers we refuse to print.
Rooms and towers — how the 758 rooms are split, and how to book directly with the hotel.
Eating on site — the rooms published at the time of writing.
Shows and events — The Colosseum, and what a show night does to parking.
Getting here — a route helper for four ways of arriving, plus a self-parking against valet comparison.
Responsible gambling — warning signs, Ontario's self-exclusion programme, and the helpline.

Before you go. The minimum age at an Ontario gaming site is 19+, set by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO). If gambling has stopped being fun for you or for someone close to you, ConnexOntario answers around the clock, free and in confidence, on 1-866-531-2600 — or you can text "connex" to 247247. Read our full page on responsible gambling.

How this guide is put together

Every factual claim on this site traces to a compiled research file built from the venue's own published pages, the regulator, the Crown corporation that owns the property, the regional tourism board and contemporary news reports. Where two of those sources gave different figures, we print neither and say so out loud. Nobody pays to appear here, and there is nothing on this site to click through to and buy. If you find something wrong, tell us and we will fix it or pull it. The method is written up in more detail on the about page.