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Promotional Onslaught – Creating a Tourism Destination

Cover of a promotional tourist booklet to promote Metis. The monochrome cover in shades of forest green shows a view of the St. Lawrence River. In the foreground, a gently sloping piece of land hosts a few spruce trees and a fence. In the background, the St. Lawrence River without waves. We can see a rowboat, a sailboat and in the distance a passenger ship and a lighthouse at the end of a rocky peninsula. It is written in large bold type "Metis Beach Que.", in smaller type "The Playground of The Lower St. Lawrence" and in a banner at the bottom of the page in capital letters "The Holiday Wonderland".

Pamphlet

Metis Beach The Playground of the Lower St. Lawrence

Metis Beach Chamber of Commerce

Les Amis des Jardins de Métis Collection

Left to their own devices, tourism operators and hotel owners are notoriously independent. They rarely, if ever, collaborate, seeing themselves as competitors rather than collaborators.

Metis was among the first regions in the Lower St. Lawrence and Gaspésie regions to form an association to promote the village as a destination. Prior to that, they promoted their hotels independently in newspapers, only collaborating by virtue of their being published on the same page.

The Metis Beach Chamber of Commerce produced a range of flyers and leaflets, the most ambitious of which extended to more than 30 pages of richly illustrated text. It used tag lines promoting Metis Beach as “the Playground of the Lower St. Lawrence” and “The Holiday Wonderland”.

In the 1930s the government of Quebec began to organize tourism operators into “syndicats de promotion”. These syndicats were the origin of the present-day regional tourism associations that were formalized in the 1970s as a government-supported system to promote tourism in partnership with local operators.

Metis Beach was among the first to join the syndicat initiative. It was a natural suite to the brochures and promotional literature that had been advertising Metis businesses and hotels for decades.