Champlain Heights Community Centre — Local services in Vancouver

We've been a few times for kids' birthday parties, including our own. Downstairs is the play area, with a bouncing castle, slides, balls and some manual kids cars. It's a fairly large area and even though there is an "enthusiastic party leader" (their own words), don't expect them to entertain the kids, pull them together and do games or even be enthusiastic. The ones we had were none of that.

But if you don't need that and just want the kids to run around, enjoy and play with some good quality toys (none of them were broken), it's a great place to be. Price is good (for more than 12 kids you need an extra party leader, equally enthusiastic as the other one).

Upstairs you'll have to decorate yourself and take it down again, but that's exactly as communicated. (Tip: give the balloons to the kids, and decorate just one side for the pictures. The place is too big to fully decorate and no one really cares. That helps reducing cleaning time.)

Two hours is not an awful lot of time, which is why you have an extra 30 minutes in advance to enter the room and start preparing. And you can take other tables and chairs if you need those - just don't forget to put them back at the end. After all, that's also why the price is low, because you do it yourself.

Staff is really friendly and helpful. They do have carts available, it makes it much easier to transport the food, drinks, decorations and gifts from and to the car and they have an elevator as well.

Take in mind: the fridge was full when we got there, and the (fairly large) cake had to go somewhere. We managed to shuffle the food around, still it took time and we shouldn't have to deal with other people's food. Just be aware...

My only complaint is that we've registered our kids in programs there a few times and then the programs were canceled due to lack of enrollment. I think they need to optimize their programming a bit better, perhaps offering fewer programs and at better times of the day, so there would be less likelihood of programs being canceled. As soon as programs are canceled, parents will not book there again for fear of it happening again, and instructions will stop offering classes there as well.

Otherwise it's a great community centre, great facilities, nice fitness center, nice staff. The roof in the gymnasium is a bit too low for badminton but ok... I need to keep my shots...

I came here for the first time with friends and had a very disappointing experience. Two Asian women, who seemed to be regulars, rudely interrupted our game twice and insisted we leave after one match. Some of our friends are less experienced so the game moved slower, but that doesn’t mean we don’t know how to play. Their behavior was selfish, disrespectful, and showed no spirit of sportsmanship. They are not staff or officials, yet acted as if they owned the place. The venue also felt poorly managed and monopolized by a small group. I will not return and do not...