Cascades Casino Resort, 2005 to now: a documented history

Cascades is young by casino-hotel standards, and its history is mostly a record of business decisions. That is the honest version, so it is the one we tell. We looked for documented legends, notable guests or famous incidents and found nothing we could stand behind, so this page has none. Where a fact comes from the operator, we say so, because an operator's number is a claim rather than an audit.

Before the casino

Langley City is a separate municipality from the surrounding Township of Langley, a compact grid of about 10 square kilometres with a 2021 census population of 28,963. The land is the traditional and unceded territory of the Kwantlen, Matsqui, Katzie and Semiahmoo First Nations, as the hotel acknowledges on its own pages. Fraser Highway, the main road between Surrey and the eastern Fraser Valley, runs through the middle of the city, and it is on that road that the casino was built.

2005: the opening

Cascades Casino opened on 5 May 2005. Gateway Casinos & Entertainment has operated it from the start. Gateway's own account of the opening, quoted on Wikipedia from a 2015 anniversary release, describes over 60,000 square feet of gaming space, a 77-room hotel and more than 25,000 square feet of convention space, with the hotel operated by Coast Hotels. That pairing (a Gateway floor and a Coast-branded hotel in one building) is still how the property works, which is why the hotel's front-desk email ends in gatewaycasinos.ca while its website sits on coasthotels.com.

The Summit Theatre years

For its first dozen years the property had a proper concert room. A 2011 BC Business profile mentions the 420-seat Summit Theatre in the casino, and when it closed the local press called it one of Langley's largest live music venues. The theatre went dark at the end of December 2017. Its replacement, a bingo hall, opened in February 2018 as part of a 23,000-square-foot expansion.

2018 to 2019: the $18 million renovation

In November 2018 Gateway unveiled the first phase of what it called an $18 million renovation and expansion (a vice-president quoted the figure as $18.6 million). Phase one spent more than $5 million on the hotel and the 26,000-square-foot convention centre: new décor in all 77 guest rooms and the public spaces, a rebuilt MATCH Eatery & Public House with an expanded all-season patio, and the new bingo hall. The release promised about 100 new jobs.

Phase two, finished in 2019, gave the gaming floor a full facelift, added 11,000 square feet of entertainment space and brought in ATLAS steak + fish, which Gateway described as its signature restaurant brand. The same release counted the floor at the time: 1,001 slot machines, 23 table games, a five-table poker room and the Crystal Room for higher-limit slots. Today's official pages list more than 1,000 slots and 28 live table games.

2025: twenty years in numbers

For the twentieth anniversary in May 2025 Gateway published a set of round-number claims that double as a portrait of the place: over 29 million visits to the gaming floor since 2005, 64,717 steaks from ATLAS's Josper oven and 97,738 signature burgers from MATCH, more than $1 million in monetary and in-kind support to non-profit and community groups, and $121.5 million paid to the City of Langley as host-community payments, $7.9 million of it in fiscal 2023/24 alone.

Three stories worth knowing

1. A bingo hall where the bands used to play

The theatre closure was not universally welcomed. A musician quoted by the Cloverdale Reporter said he had hoped the room could be dual-purpose, bingo by day and bands at weekends. It became a bingo hall only. Today it runs two sessions a day from Thursday to Sunday, and the live music has moved to the pub.

2. The oven that counts its steaks

A Josper is a closed charcoal oven, part grill and part oven, built in Spain and used in steakhouses that want charcoal flavour indoors. Gateway's habit of counting what comes out of it says something about how the operator sees the place: the restaurants are a product in their own right, with their own phone lines and their own regulars.

3. A city with a casino line in its budget

The host payments are not trivial for a city this size. City council formally approved the expansion that began in 2018, and the property doubles as a community venue: this year's Festival of Trees runs from 18 November to 16 December, with trees decorated by local businesses.

What comes next: 203 Street and the SkyTrain

The Surrey Langley SkyTrain, named the Dave Barrett Extension, will run 16 kilometres on an elevated guideway along Fraser Highway from King George Station in Surrey to 203 Street in Langley City, with eight new stations and a bus exchange at Langley City Centre. The provincial project site gives late 2029 as the anticipated in-service date. When it opens, Cascades will be a short walk from a rapid-transit station, something only Parq can claim among the BC properties in our ranking today.

What we could not confirm

• The architect or design firm of the 2005 building. Not published anywhere we looked.
• The number of storeys. The hotel mentions ice machines on the third and fifth floors, nothing more.
• The opening date of ATLAS to the day. Sources agree on 2019 only.
• Whether the 2020 pandemic closure dates at Cascades matched other BC casinos. We did not find a Langley-specific source, so we do not print them.

Sources: Gateway 20th anniversary via G3 Newswire, 2 June 2025; 2018 phase-one release via World Casino Directory; Cloverdale Reporter, 8 January 2018; Wikipedia: Gateway Casinos (secondary); Wikipedia: Langley City (census figure, secondary); Surrey Langley SkyTrain; cascadescasino.ca. Checked 15 November 2026.