Seizing the Opportunity – Exploring Smart_Tourism in Sutton

Seizing the Opportunity – Exploring Smart_Tourism in Sutton

From a Midweek Wander to a New Model for Collaborative Tourism Development

What if a visitor to Sutton didn’t simply book a room, visit an attraction, or enjoy a meal, but discovered the region as one connected experience? What if accommodations, restaurants, vineyards, arts and cultural experiences, attractions and other local businesses worked together to give visitors more reasons to come, more reasons to stay, and more ways to experience what the community and its region have to offer?

What if the lessons learned in Sutton could help inform a broader approach to tourism development across Quebec? These are some of the current questions behind the Sutton Collaborative Tourism Initiative, which is still very much in the exploratory stage.  Its importance lies not only in what is happening in Sutton today, but in what CEDEC and its partners are learning about how tourism could work differently tomorrow.

The Opportunity: Smart_Tourism

Tourism is one of ten economic opportunities identified in CEDEC’s Road to Prosperity: The 2026-2028 OLMCQ Collaborative Economic Development Roadmap. The Roadmap recognizes an important challenge: Quebec has plenty of great tourism assets. Across the province, accommodations, restaurants, attractions, cultural experiences, festivals, outdoor activities, transportation services, and distinctive communities are worth discovering.

Too often, however, those assets operate independently. Visitors may discover one attraction but never learn about another nearby. A hotel may bring someone into a region without that visitor discovering local food, culture or recreation. Smaller operators may have exceptional experiences to offer but struggle to reach larger visitor markets. And communities that thrive on weekend or peak-season tourism may have unused capacity during the rest of the week or year.

Smart_Tourism seeks to change that.

CEDEC’s Roadmap proposes moving from fragmented tourism activity toward coordinated visitor experiences that make it easier for visitors to discover more, stay longer, invest more in their leisure time, and engage more deeply with the communities they visit.

The opportunity is economic as much as it is experiential. Better coordination can increase visitor spending, strengthen small and medium-sized tourism businesses, extend stays, support off-season activity and distribute tourism benefits across more businesses and communities.  

Sutton as a Place to Explore

Working with CEDEC, Public, Private, and Civil Society Partners have been exploring how collaboration could strengthen Sutton’s overall tourism attractiveness. In 2025, a group of local and regional tourism operators came together around a practical question: Could they accomplish more for Sutton by working together? Responding in the affirmative, Tourisme Sutton, Vignoble Domaine Bresee, Sutton School of Art, Le Pleasant Hôtel, Château Ste-Agnès and Hôtel & Bistro Horizon formed the Sutton Collaborative Tourism Initiative.

Autumn weekends are already an important part of Sutton’s tourism economy. The challenge was the quieter period between weekends. That created an opportunity: Could Sutton give visitors compelling reasons to come during the week, too? The result was Sutton Midweek Wander, an initial pilot bringing participating tourism businesses together around midweek accommodations and a range of local experiences.

Sutton Midweek Wander is a tourism pilot initiative. Seen through the Roadmap’s Smart_Tourism lens, it enables CEDEC and its Partners to test how a group of independent tourism operators can begin functioning as a more connected visitor economy.

From Promotion to Visitor Experience

Smart_Tourism is not simply about producing more advertising or another tourism website. The Roadmap calls for a collaborative model that can eventually bring together tourism information, visitor engagement, small-business participation, regional storytelling, transportation, integrated itineraries, digital tools and performance measurement.

Sutton Midweek Wander begins with something quite straightforward: local businesses coordinating their offers and giving visitors a reason to experience several parts of Sutton rather than encountering each business separately. As an exploratory initiative, this pilot is generating very useful Smart_Tourism questions.

  • What combinations of experiences attract visitors?
  • What makes them stay longer?
  • What encourages them to visit during quieter periods?
  • How can smaller operators participate?
  • How can accommodation, food, culture, recreation and local attractions reinforce one another?
  • What does collaboration require from participating businesses?
  • And, ultimately, does working together generate greater economic value than working separately?

The Roadmap deliberately treats early initiatives as a testing ground from which to learn and improve. Its development model begins with incubation and pilots so that partners can test operating approaches, build relationships, identify weaknesses, refine implementation and establish early evidence of value before attempting to scale.

Exploring in Sutton and Looking Beyond

That is what makes the Sutton initiative worth watching. Its immediate focus is local: helping Sutton’s tourism operators work together to attract visitors, particularly during periods of growth. Its potential significance is larger.

The Roadmap envisions the Smart_Tourism opportunity to improve tourism across the province.  Sutton offers CEDEC and its partners a real-world environment in which elements of that idea can begin to be explored. There will be lessons. Some ideas will work better than others. The model will change. New partners may join. New initiatives may emerge. That is exactly what an initiative under construction should do.

The destination is not simply another successful tourism campaign. It is learning how to turn many individual tourism assets into a connected visitor experience, and that connected experience into stronger economic opportunity for businesses, workers and communities.

Sutton Midweek Wander is a beginning. Taking advantage of the Smart_Tourism opportunity across Quebec is the work ahead of us.