Canadian Hotel Strikes Gold With Parking Garage Hockey Rink

One thing is certain at youth hockey tournaments: Between games, players will pick up mini-sticks in hotel halls. A Hilton Garden Inn in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, identified the rowdy games as a problem immediately after it opened in 2020.

Moncton—a city of roughly 100,000—hosts multiple major youth hockey tournaments every winter weekend at its Avenir Centre, just blocks from the Garden Inn Downtown Moncton . (The venue also serves as home ice for the QMJHL’s Moncton Wildcats.) The raucous knee-hockey games moved the hotel to build a “youth hockey room”—a ball hockey rink built into the property’s underground parking garage.

Earlier this week, it announced the return of the mini-rink for a second season. The concept was an instant hit when it debuted last year, but demand has reached a new level.

“We’ve received over 200 voicemails and about 300 emails the last few days,” hotel GM Francis Goguen tells Front Office Sports. “They’re coming from teams wanting to book with us for the first time and from those who already booked somewhere else in town but want to move their whole team here.”

For years, employees had floated the idea of creating a formal space to corral their young guests’ eager energy. “Last fall,” Goguen says, he finally “just went for it.”  

The property didn’t need much corporate approval for the project—which cost around $3,000 and “paid for itself virtually right away”—because they decided to situate it in an awkward, otherwise unused corner of the below-ground lot. (Hilton corporate headquarters did not respond to a FOS request for comment.)

The 60-by-20-foot rink is painted with proper lines, and is surrounded by freshly painted, 4-foot-high boards. Flags of Canada’s two most popular NHL teams—the Canadiens and Maple Leafs—hang above full-size nets on either end. 

Goguen says it’s “pretty much packed” each day from check-in to lights out, which, for most tournament teams, is around 10 p.m. (He’s considering implementing a formal schedule this year to ensure playing time is evenly dispersed among visiting teams). 

Adjacent to the rink is the “Parents Corner”—named after “Coach’s Corner,” a long-running commentary segment on Hockey Night in Canada. It’s populated with patio sets pulled in from the hotel’s exterior area that’s open over the summer. Janice McPherson, a mother of two hockey players and manager of a U11 team from Bedford, Nova Scotia, says parents brought a projector for movies and set up picnics while their kids burned off steam last year.

“The minute we got our schedule for this season and I saw we were going to Moncton, I called the [Garden Inn]. If you get this hotel for your tournament, everyone is like, ‘Oh, you won the lottery,’” McPherson adds. “As a manager, when you show up to a hotel, you feel like you’re signing on the dotted line that you can control seventeen families and kids who are all coming back so excited and fueled by their games. This makes it so much easier. … It’s really more than just a room.” 

In addition to the tournaments, Moncton is the site of NAPA Hockey Heroes Weekend, a charity event that attracts many former pros every June. Several, including Max Talbot and Marc-Andre Fleury, stopped by to take in the Garden Inn rink while they were in town. 

From this week, the 117-room property is fully booked on each weekend through June 1, 2027, usually hosting four to five teams at a time. Some have already begun calling to reserve blocks for late 2027 and even into 2028. “It’s the most successful idea I’ve had in my 25-year career in hotel management,” GM Goguen says. 

“ATTENTION, ALL HOTELS IN HOCKEY TOWNS! Time to STEP UP YOUR GAME!” wrote one patron on the hotel’s Facebook page. “Hilton Garden Inn Moncton Downtown is playing in a league of its own! ”