Cape Breton Resorts
Ancient Celts are feted today for their social equality - Celtic women were independent, active in the community, and even property owners. Their hard-working progeny are credited with innovations as diverse as the self-titled macadam (paved) road to the telephone (Bell), from television (Baird) to penicillin (Fleming).
Contemporary Cape Breton, Nova Scotia - island home to thousands of Scottish and Irish descendants - thrives on this open, creative Celtic culture.
Little surprise, then, that an heir to that famous Scottish resourcefulness would be behind the province's largest resort company.
What family matriarch Isobel MacDonald MacAulay began with a tiny bed-and-breakfast in beautiful Baddeck has grown into Cape Breton Resorts today, offering visitors some 340 rooms, waterfront recreational amenities, conference facilities, and 18-hole golf in four locations around the Island.
Baddeck, where Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell developed some of his most notable inventions in the early 1900s, is still the company's headquarters.
“My mother’s really the innkeeper in the family,” says Scott MacAulay, CEO of Cape Breton Resorts, who took over ownership and operations with his wife, Terri, in 1979. “Both my mother and father were hard workers and very true to the business and reinvested in the business.”
These days, Cape Breton Resorts is reinvesting in Cape Breton.
The company employs nearly 400 staff and supports the Cape Breton economy by purchasing from local suppliers and partnering with area companies, such as boat tour operators. Its Lifestyles vacation home developments utilize the expertise of dozens of community contractors..
Cape Breton Resorts also functions as a major sponsor of Cape Breton marketing, promoting the Island provincially, nationally and worldwide as a year-round destination (even though its own resorts are seasonal operations).
MacAulay explains that without the attraction of Cape Breton - one of the world’s top vacation islands – there could be no Cape Breton Resorts. “There’s no question [Cape Breton] is what we’re selling. It’s the whole culture, lifestyle, feel, music, surroundings, and day trip opportunities,” he says.
Cape Breton Resorts attracts visitors from all over the world, with most coming from the United States and central Canada.
It all started in 1971, when Isobel MacAulay bought an inn in Baddeck called the Inverary, located in an historic 18th century home (one of three built by an enterprising Scot for his daughters). She and her late husband Dannie turned it into a popular Cabot Trail bed-and-breakfast, featured in Country Inns and Backroads magazine.
As a boy, Scott “loved to cut grass” and was delighted when his parents expanded the property down to the shore of the Bras d’Or Lakes. Today, the Inverary remains as Baddeck’s only lakeside resort.
The young MacAulay also harboured a passion for restoration. “I like to take something old or not looking so good and try to make it look better,” he says.
Under his tenure, the business has expanded from one resort property to four -- in Baddeck, Ingonish, and West Bay.
Over the past few years, Cape Breton Resorts has also successfully moved into the regional business market, with golf (you guessed it -- a Scottish game) as the main attraction.
“It’s difficult to get a conference if you don’t have a golf course,” MacAulay explains. So MacAulay and a few partners developed the Bell Bay Golf Club, with an 18-hole course designed by award-winning Canadian architect Thomas McBroom.
Bell Bay, with its stunning views of the Bras d’Or Lakes and Baddeck, is now a popular part of Inverary Resort.
In the late 1980s, MacAulay envisioned expanding to other locations, forming a triad of resort properties on the Bras d’Or Lakes, accessible by boat. With Inverary as the anchor, MacAulay bought Dundee Resort and Golf Club, West Bay, in 1991.
Tucked away from the main road on a wooded bluff overlooking the eastern Bras d’Or shore, Dundee offers up a pristine setting for nature hikes and boating - and a few surprises, including a championship 18-hole golf course, deep lawns for recreation, and full resort amenities. MacAulay added the 60-room main lodge to supplement the cottages.
Plans were revised again when no suitable third property was found on the Lakes. Ceilidh Country Lodge, across the road from the Inverary, was added in 1994 to provide more overnight options. And in 2000, the company acquired Glenghorm Beach Resort, Ingonish.
Glenghorm and its mile-long stretch of white sand beach offers a seaside location in the heart of the Cabot Trail, with ready access to Cape Breton Highlands National Park and the famed Highlands Links - Canada’s top-ranked public golf course.
MacAulay recently expanded into real estate development. In May 2008, he unveiled Cape Breton Resorts Lifestyles - vacation home communities attached to each of the main resort properties. The homes, which include lifetime use of resort amenities and golf, offer worry-free maintenance and rental options for owners when they’re away.
The response has been swift, with Cape Breton expats snapping up most of the first few phases.
“The whole concept behind [Lifestyles] is that we truly believe that Cape Breton is a great vacation destination, and one that people we’ll always come to,” says MacAulay.
Cape Breton Resorts has come a long way since its humble beginnings. As for bed-and-breakfasts, it’s now “Cape Breton’s largest,” laughs MacAulay.
Isobel MacAulay still asks her son if he thinks he made the right decision by coming back to Cape Breton. “I never even thought about anywhere else,” the younger MacAulay says. Although he attended college in Dartmouth, N.S., and studied restaurant and hotel management, MacAulay credits his mother for his education. “She taught me everything I know,” he says, like a true Scotswoman’s son.
