The revitalization of a heritage travel route: Canada’s Cabot Trail

ABSTRACT

Scenic travel routes have been developed to provide opportunities for tourism and recreation and to promote economic development especially in rural areas. However, maintaining an iconic attraction requires a collaborative destination management effort to keep it viable. The Cabot Trail, Nova Scotia, Canada is used in this paper as a case study for a scenic heritage route revitalization process. The Tourism Area Life Cycle model stages are used to illustrate the tourism development and decline on the Cabot Trail. This paper is a detailed documentation and analysis of the impact of a not-for-profit volunteer organization’s efforts to revitalize the Cabot Trail, through collaboration with local businesses, community groups and various levels of government and funding agencies. It draws upon the drive tourism, heritage trails and tourism revitalization literature. It fills a gap in the knowledge on heritage trails by illustrating a revitalization process that could be repeated in other areas experiencing similar issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage trails
• routes
• Tourism Area Life Cycle
• Cabot Trail
• revitalization
• drive tourism
• destination management

Acknowledgements

Thank you to all of the operators and community groups on the Cabot Trail for your hundreds of hours of volunteer work on the CTWA initiatives. Thank you as well for the board of directors, municipal, federal and provincial government for lending their expertise and financial support.

Disclosure statement

There is no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Dr Kim Lemky is an Associate Researcher at Brandon University, Manitoba, Canada at the Rural Development Institute (and in 2016 was the Acting Director from January to June) and the Centre for Aboriginal and Rural Education Studies. She has taught at the University of New Brunswick in the Faculties of Business and Arts for both the undergraduate and MBA programs. After completing her PhD at the University of Waterloo, she was the executive director of a not-for-profit organization, responsible for destination development on the Cabot Trail, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Her research interests lie in destination management, community led tourism initiatives, economic and social impact assessment of UNESCO designated global geoparks and national park management.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for the CTWA came from a variety of sources. The Nova Scotia government provided $400 000 (Can. Dollars) as seed money towards the organization. Although federal agencies did not come on board immediately, the project actively sought matching funding and support for its various projects, for example, a conference fee was charged, ads were sold both on the website and on the Cabot Trail map. Service Canada (federal government) supported labour costs for the Cabot Trail View clearing projects. Eventually when the process became more structured and funding needs were specifically identified the federal government (Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) formerly Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation (ECBC)) supported other projects in partnership with the provincial and municipal governments. As well, opportunities were given on the Cabot Trail website and the Cabot Trail map for sponsorship by private businesses.