It’s another summer season for the Malahat Skywalk. In this, their second full summer in existence, additional programming is the next frontier that they hope to explore.
“We opened in the flurry of COVID and we were quite busy right off the hop for a number of different reasons,” says Malahat Skywalk General Manager, Ken Bailey. “So we spent a good part of last summer understanding our traffic flow and listening to feedback from customers and what more they were looking for.”
The tourist attraction has slowly been adding to its amenities since it opened two years and is now hosting things at the tower like live music and yoga sessions.
Bailey says he’s hoping it will give people an excuse to hang out at the tower.
“People really love hanging out at the tower,” says Bailey. “So we’ve really focused on adding elements of engagement and fun out at the tower area.”
He says a large part of that engagement is through food and beverage. They’ve added to their plaza area at the base of the tower. Now they’ve got pizza from a place in Brentwood Bay, soft serve ice cream from a place in Mill Bay, and they’re getting their canteen licensed to serve alcohol soon.
“You can sit there on a Saturday afternoon and watch some live music, have a fresh hot pizza, and a cold beer,” says Bailey. “It’s the best deck in Southern Vancouver Island.”
They have been adding to the tower area’s infrastructure as well since opening.
“If somebody came in our very first summer the area in and around the tower would have been gravel,” says Bailey. “Now it’s got paving stone, we’ve got gardens, we’ve got a beautiful playground that Kinsol Timber Systems built for us out of log.
“We’ve done quite a bit in that first phase to get us ready for that second phase, which we’re rolling out now around the animation of that area.”
They’re also looking at accessibility to the tower, with a new shuttle service to downtown Victoria.
“One of our key learnings was realizing that a lot of people come to Victoria without vehicles and for them to get here, we needed to provide transportation options,” says Bailey.
Bailey says while many who visit them are single visits from out of town, they do have a base of around 7,000 annual pass holders. Their expanded programming is in part an effort to give more added value to those pass holders.
“The programming is meant to create value,” says Bailey. “One for our pass holder base, and two for the people that are visiting, give them something unique that they might not get in their travels.”
