On the first day of a stay at Myers Cave Resort, Nawar Hage sees guests arrive from Toronto or Montreal with phones in hand. By the second day, the phones have been put away and everyone seems a little more at home in North Frontenac. By checkout, sometimes it’s the children who are the least ready to go home.

“I’ve enjoyed watching that time and again,” said Nawar.'

For Nawar, who has operated Myers Cave Resort with her husband, Mike, since November 2020, those moments are among the pleasures of running a tourism business in Ontario’s Highlands. After years of planning events for clients around the world, she now gets to see how an experience unfolds for guests from the time they arrive to the moment they head home.

Originally from Lebanon, Nawar earned degrees in sociology of development and interior design before beginning her event planning career in 2002. Both fields turned out to be good preparation for the work. Sociology taught her how to do research, while interior design taught her to think about colour, space and how to make a room work for the people using it.

Nawar’s career in event planning took her from Lebanon to Abu Dhabi and involved projects around the world. When the couple purchased Myers Cave Resort in 2020, they already knew the hospitality industry from years of working alongside it. Now they were the ones welcoming guests.

At Myers Cave Resort, Nawar still draws on her event planning experience, whether she’s organizing an activity or looking after the details of a guest’s stay. She gets to work directly with the people she’s planning for, and she can see how their days change once they’ve had a chance to slow down and spend more time outside.

It was Mike’s experience on the Ontario’s Highlands Tourism Organization (OHTO) Board of Directors that first made Nawar consider applying. She saw how much he enjoyed learning, meeting other people in tourism and taking part in decisions that affected the regional tourism industry. When OHTO held a retreat at Myers Cave Resort, and later when she met more members at a retreat in Bancroft, Nawar got to know the people behind that work and was struck by the energy they brought to it.

Nawar sees her international events experience and her relatively recent arrival in Ontario as two perspectives she can bring to the board. She still notices things that people who have lived in the area longer might take for granted. She also wants to better understand how tourism policies are set and what they mean for the day-to-day work of operators in North Frontenac. For Nawar, being part of those discussions is a way to give a smaller tourism area a voice in decisions made across the region.

Her advice to anyone wondering whether they have the right experience is to start with what they’ve learned from working in tourism.

“Every person has a different experience,” said Nawar.

Having served on governing boards before, Nawar also understands why prospective directors ask about the time commitment. She describes board meetings as typically monthly, with committee work adding meetings depending on what the group is working on. Serving on the board gives operators a chance to hear how others approach similar challenges and to share what has worked in their own communities across Ontario’s Highlands.

Interested in joining OHTO’s Board of Directors?

If you work in tourism and want to help shape its future in Ontario’s Highlands, consider bringing your experience to OHTO’s Board of Directors. Visit the Board of Directors page for details about the role, eligibility and the nomination process.

Board of Directors