2023 Year in Review

We are still recovering from a wild 2023 season! After a huge bounce-back year in 2022, we were not sure what to expect last summer. In the end, we nearly matched our 2022 season in terms of big smiles coming in and out of that float plane!

Imagine a bright and sunny morning around a bustling dock where guides and boats are at the ready, awaiting guests as they finish a hearty breakfast. The day’s action is about to begin. The guests start to trickle down to the dock. Guides are there to welcome you with a smile and a handshake and to get coolers packed up for the day. The anticipation and thrill of the hunt is in full effect! This was the scene every morning this past summer at Aikens Lake.

As most trips to Aikens are 3 or 4-night stays, the dock was also a busy airport! We had 324 flights in all last summer! The float planes brought us happy people from all over the world (even a few groups from France!). The pure joy of an arrival at Aikens is such a beautiful thing to see and experience. That handshake line with all the staff lined up to greet our guests is a trademark of the “Aikens Experience”. For those who have already visited, after only a few moments on the dock, it feels like you never left Aikens. It’s like slipping on a comfy shoe – it just feels right!

We were appreciative to have so many people returning from the previous season. In fact, 74.1% of our guests in 2023 were returning customers. It was the highest repeat rate we have seen, as the average has been 66.3% for the past decade. That speaks to how people value the “Aikens Experience”. Reconnecting with yourself, reconnecting with family and friends, and reconnecting with nature all got bumped up in importance in recent years. People have noticed that Aikens is the perfect place for those important aspects of self-care to take center stage.

In terms of our season, things started off once again in early May. A late spring had us calling the helicopter charter for a ride because there was still ice out on the lake. A small crew of five flew up (Pit, Julie, Pat, Sean, Kurt, and the dogs of course). The low water allowed us to land right on the beach to start getting things open for the season. It is a strange feeling to be up there when there is ice on the lake and snow on the ground. With our guest season quickly approaching on May 20^th, we wanted to make sure that we were ready and that there was nothing missing for those first guests. In the end, we were happy to have that head start before “Molly Week”.

After a busy season in 2022 and seeing a repeat happening in 2023, we decided to beef up the staff a little bit. Having more help around camp is always a huge asset. Specifically, we hired an extra server, an extra guide, and a few extra general labourers. This proved important throughout the summer because it takes a lot of people to provide the kind of top-notch customer service we expect to deliver at Aikens. The staff arrived a few days before our guests, and overall, we had just over a dozen new team members. That meant some quick training to get everyone up to speed. We are so proud of our young energetic team at Aikens … they are truly a cut above! Within days, people had settled in as if they had years of experience. It didn’t take long to have the camp humming and to have it function like a well-oiled machine. Our team is truly the difference between having “The Aikens Experience”, or simply being on a trip to “just another fishing lodge on a lake in Manitoba”.

In terms of our guests, we saw a few trends this year. There was certainly a larger emphasis on family and couples’ trips. This represented our largest segment in guest metrics, and included in that was a record 63 couples trips at Aikens! In fact, ladies represented 1 out of every 6 guests at Aikens last year. We don’t have official stats, but anecdotally we believe that it would rank at, or near, the top in the fly-in industry.

The other notable bump was the return of corporate travel. As you can imagine there weren’t many corporate trips in 2020 or 2021. We started to see the return of corporate travel in 2022. However, this last season we hosted more companies than in any other year. Not only did we host many traditional “customer-reward” style trips, but more and more companies are seeing the value of the team-building experience up at the lodge. This is especially true in recent years as many companies have moved away from having a central office and/or are seeing more employees work virtually from home. For groups of 24-32 people, you can have exclusivity of the camp. In 2023 we had five of these groups. Note that it is best to plan these a year in advance to secure an available time slot in our booking schedule for a group that size.

Combined, all these guests kept us very busy until our season wrapped up in mid-September. We were thankful to have such a busy year. It has truly been a blessing to have had these two excellent summers post-pandemic. We are officially back to our pre-pandemic strength.

A sincere “thank you” to all our guests, our team, our partners, our volunteers, our suppliers, and Bluewater Aviation for making it all happen. We are so grateful for the experiences that we can all share in the middle of the Boreal Forest in Northern Canada!