the years? VT : It’s evolved quite a bit. Originally, before I had the lodge, I tried the bed and breakfast scene for a year or two. I learned from that experience that I needed to be in the hotel business. There was so much demand and only one other bed and breakfast on the island – and she had up-to 50 people sleeping in that house every night during peak season. It was really apparent that we needed to have a lodge here. I built my house here first, but both the house and the business were built with the view in mind. When I built my house, it wasn’t the typical design for the area. There’s a tra- dition in many small communities in Nova Scotia where the locals take tours of people’s homes when they’re built or renovated. What people wanted to do more than anything was stand on the deck and see the view. During that first year I must have had a hundred people tell me that this was the perfect place to build a lodge or hotel because of the view. When we built the original hotel, we received help from ACOA [Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency], but that came with a lot of restrictions. We didn’t end up with what we had in mind. One mistake we made in the original hotel was making the dining room too large. We quickly realized that we didn’t have enough rooms. We were almost imme- diately past capacity. We knew that if we were going to
survive as a business, we needed more rooms. We put together the means to renovate and make some additions.
With the additional rooms, it then became apparent that we needed a communal place, that wasn’t the dining room, for guests to gather to specifically enjoy the view. That’s when we built the lounge on. We can easily seat 50 people in the lounge. Our last phase of expansion was to add-on to the dining room because it became too small. It’s now licensed for a hundred people. We’ve also added several more rooms. We now have 38 and we’re happy with that number for now. We have a range of rooms. We have rooms that start at $109, and they’re the original rooms we opened with. They’re a little smaller than standard hotel rooms. Ten dollars more gets you a small walk-out deck. From there, there’s our Superior Rooms, which all have an ocean view. Those rooms have either two queens, or one king size bed. We use those mainly for our packages. We get a lot of off-season weddings. We don’t do weddings during peak season – we’re just too busy as it is. When we do weddings, though, we get people coming from all over and with different spins on their ceremonies. Sometimes the wedding is done on the grounds of the lodge, some- times it’s done at the lighthouse here on the island, or on one of the whale watching boats, or down on one of the
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APRIL 2017 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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