Brett Thoms
Fort-Coulonge April 27, 2023
Explore Pontiac, the new brand for the Pontiac Tourism Association, held its AGM last Thursday at the Cinema Lyn in Fort-Coulonge.
The event included standard AGM activities like the election of a board, presentation of finances, an activity report and more.
Notably, there was special presentations of well-produced videos of Pontiac tourism businesses, called Lake2Plate which you can watch here . . .
(https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLICTKZmCff4roTtqwFJTkRNhYcKODaSjR) and a presentation from Tourism Consultant, Mylène Deneault.
Deneault spoke with THE EQUITY before her presentation.
“I’ll be speaking to the group tonight on how to attract short-term rental guests into discovering the region,” Deneault said. “It’s one thing bringing the people in renting cottages, renting Airbnbs, and renting other short-term rentals, but we need to get them out and exploring the region.”
“The best way of doing that is to make your locals great Pontiac ambassadors,” Deneault said. “We need to have our Pontiac locals know what to answer when we are asked what is there to do in the Pontiac. So instead of staying at the cottage, people know they can go for a 30-minute drive, and enjoy the Chutes Coulonge or stop in Shawville and see beautiful boutiques down on Main Street.”
Deneault said there needs to be a Pontiac-wide effort to get the word out about all the activities available to short-term visitors. This means getting servers, gas station attendants, depanneur employees, and more in on the crowd sourced advertising.
“I’m a cottage owner in Otter lake so I know,” Deneault said. “We bought the cottage in 2019, just before the pandemic and we were up here every weekend. So we had the opportunity to discover everything there is to do and we just need to get the word out.”
