In order not to spend the long Easter holidays in the dark, the residents of the greater Montreal area preferred to leave the regions at short notice and spend the weekend in hotels.
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“Given the power outages in Montreal, we feared the situation and made some last-minute reservations,” explains Gilles Babin, owner of Hotel Oui Go in Trois-Rivières.
In Mauricie, a region spared Wednesday’s power outages and ice storm, several hoteliers have noticed an increase in reservations at their property.
“It really surprised us with my colleague, it’s rare that we see so many last minute requests. We thought it was extraordinary, but we suspect it will happen because of the cuts in Montreal,” said Guillaume Bruneau, receptionist at the Auberge du Lac St-Pierre, also in Trois-Rivières.
The story is the same in Saint-Alexis-des-Monts, at the Auberge du Lac-à-l’Eau-Claire, although it’s difficult to confirm that all the customers are from Montreal.
“Typically people book six months or a year in advance. It’s never a matter of people arriving at the last minute, but we’ve had a few,” said Dina Pryor, the property’s receptionist.
Customers come earlier
Easter weekend is already a busy time for hotels in the Quebec region. Many have been full for a long time, but we still feel a higher volume of calls than usual from the metropolis.
“We have customers from Montreal who booked as of today [vendredi]but they brought their reservation forward a day to arrive yesterday because they don’t have electricity,” said an employee of Hotel Le Concorde.
“We’ve had other customers who preferred to cancel because they had damage to their home or had electric cars and couldn’t move,” she added.
At Hotel Le Bonne Entente we try to accommodate as many customers as possible who are directly or indirectly affected by power outages.
“We have several people who live in Montreal but have already been with us for a week on business and have chosen to stay in Quebec for the weekend because they are not interested in going back home knowing they will not have electricity have,” he told Audrey Bédard, receptionist.
The Hotel Entourage sur-le-Lac in Lac-Beauport has also received calls from customers in the Montreal area trying to find a last-minute room.
“I managed to find a room for a client from Montreal this morning. The first thing he asked was if we had electricity,” said Elisabeth Ainsley, an employee at the facility.
In collaboration with Diane Tremblay
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