Daniel Gauthier does not hide it, he admits to feeling a certain excitement at the dawn of the official opening, this Monday afternoon, of the first Club Med mountain village in Canada, in Petite-Rivière-Saint-François. It must be said that it has now been 10 years since the Chairman of the Board and majority shareholder of the Le Massif Group initiated the first discussions with the renowned international operator of holiday villages to set up in Charlevoix. “This is an important milestone in our development plan,” explains the co-founder of Cirque du Soleil.
Q. Are you excited, this official opening of Club Med at Le Massif? However, you have been preparing for it for a long time now, have you been working there for at least 10 years?
R. Well yes, there is excitement, especially since Club Med has decided to do this on a large scale. There will be a lot of politicians, dignitaries, CEO Henri Giscard d’Estaing and several Club Med leaders will be there.
It is the first four-season mountain village that Club Med will inaugurate in North America. It is important to them. Club Med is not just seaside villages with straw huts.
They operate more than twenty four-season mountain villages in Europe and even in Asia, Japan and China, but Club Med du Massif marks a return of the banner in North America to mountain villages.
Q. How do you explain that the process took so long before arriving at the establishment of Club Med and its 300-room hotel in Petite-Rivière-Saint-François?
R. We started the approaches in 2011. At the end of the mountain development planning, we decided that we had to diversify the forms of accommodation. During our discussions, we mentioned Club Med and contacted them at their office for the Americas and the Caribbean in Miami.
They were immediately very receptive because they wanted to return to North America with all-season mountain villages, but the negotiations dragged on, and then there was a takeover bid. ) hostile to Club Med and its takeover by the Fosun International group.
We resumed discussions with them and we managed to put together the right financial package with their involvement.
PHOTO SARAH MONGEAU-BIRKETT, PRESS ARCHIVES
Club Med de Charlevoix
Q. The official opening was scheduled for last year and you postponed it for a year. Did this postponement result in additional costs?
R. Actually no. It was even a good thing. We faced delays from some suppliers and could not have opened properly last year due to COVID. Above all, we avoided completing the work in a hurry and having to pay 20% more to complete it on time. We took the time to do things right and according to the voluminous specifications of Club Med.
We’re talking about a 300-room hotel, but there are 70 additional rooms for employees. There are four restaurants, kitchens, reception rooms, spaces for children… This is not a conventional hotel.
Q. How much will the entire project cost and how did you share the costs?
R. For the construction of the hotel, we are talking about a total project of around 130 million, including financial and professional costs. Le Massif Group is the majority shareholder, but Club Med has also invested in construction and signed a 15-year long-term agreement as operator of the site.
On our side, we had to make certain investments in the mountains, such as a new slope to access the hotel and snowmaking equipment.
PHOTO SARAH MONGEAU-BIRKETT, PRESS ARCHIVES
Club Med de Charlevoix
Q. Club Med will welcome its first customers on Friday. What type of clientele do you expect this year?
R. We already have an occupancy rate of over 80% for the entire season and it’s full for the holidays. The clientele will be mainly Quebec and Canadian, although we will also receive Americans who can now come more easily to the country, and even Brazilians and Mexicans.
When the situation returns to normal, Club Med predicts that the clientele will be more North American during the winter season, but more European during the summer. People will take Charlevoix as their destination, and hotel guests will go to La Malbaie as well as to the whales in Baie-Sainte-Catherine.
Q. Ticket prices have increased this year at Le Massif. Is this an impact of Club Med on mountain activities?
R. The price increase has nothing to do with Club Med. Everything costs more: gasoline, electricity, food and, above all, labor. We have to adjust our prices according to reality.
We must invest in new snowmaking technologies to cope with climate change and to recover from the winter rains which occur in the middle of January and which destroy our slopes. That is the real reasons.
Club Med is a filling machine for the hotel. They have a network of customers all over the world and they provide eight million overnight stays per year. The entire region will benefit from this traffic. We are talking about 300 rooms, but 800 residents at the hotel since we expect a lot of families.
Q. You have been the owner of Le Massif since 2002. How many investments has the Le Massif Group made since you acquired it?
R. You should know that we are involved in three types of activities. There is the mountain pole, that of Baie-Saint-Paul with the hotel La Ferme, the public square and the train station, and also the rail pole which connects Petite-Rivière-Saint-François to Quebec and La Malbaie.
Over the past 20 years, we had to invest 300 million and for 18 years, there was only one year when I did not have to reinvest to cover our costs. For two years, we have managed to repay the capital and interest to the bank and have a little to reinvest in the mountain.
I would also like to thank the investors who joined me for 10 years, Investissement Québec, the Germain family, Pierre Thabet, the owner of Boa-Franc, and Jean Leclerc, from Laura Secord, who were patient and who supported our development plan.
Q. Club Med is an important milestone for the Massif, but real estate development on the mountain is also another important driver of traffic. Does this shutter deploy correctly?
R. There is currently a buzz around the Massif. With COVID, many city dwellers have needed some fresh air. We built over a hundred units on the summit and a few dozen at the base of the mountain.
We have a bank of buyers who want to acquire a property and the potential to go up to 1,250 doors with condo-hotel projects, but we are going at our own pace, in blocks of around 30 doors, but the timing is excellent now.