By Avery Mullen
It was barely a month ago that Ambassatours Gray Line, the sightseeing and hospitality stalwart, was announced as a finalist for the Halifax Business Awards, but company CEO Dennis Campbell is already eyeing the future: by the end of this decade, he hopes to see two new cruise ship berths open in Dartmouth.
Ambassatours, which operates Halifax’s well-known Harbour Hopper amphibious buses, the Tall Ship ‘Silva’ and a raft of tours to popular destinations like Peggy’s Cove, is a finalist for Business of the Year. With cruise ships providing the bulk of the company’s clientele, Campbell hopes a pair of new berths in Dartmouth’s Shannon Park neighbourhood could replace two on the Halifax side that are in the process of being retrofitted to accommodate freighters and have been unavailable to the cruise industry since last year.
In an interview, Campbell tells The Macdonald Notebook that cruise ships that would have previously relied on those berths have been anchoring in the harbour and using small transport tenders to ferry passengers to the shore. The Port of Halifax has been considering several potential locations on the north side of the harbour to add new cruise ship infrastructure, though Campbell says he believes Ambassatours is an outlier in hoping the berths will be located in Shannon Park, where commercial and residential development is slated to eventually add 3,000 new housing units.
“Shannon Park is going to be pretty special when it’s developed,” says Campbell. “(Cruise ships) could be a neat dynamic, as part of it.”
Dennis Campbell is owner of Ambassatours, the toursm company that runs among other things the Halifax Harbour Hoppers.
The focus on the future is typical of Campbell, who describes the outsized success of his business as a pleasant surprise. It has been mostly by dint of good weather that the tender boats have proven a viable option for cruise ships, he recalls. But with the cruise lines telling Ambassatours they expect 2026 to be their best season ever, he says a permanent solution is needed.
Shannon Park, which will be developed under a partnership between Canada Lands Company, a federal Crown corporation, and Millbrook First Nation, represents an alternative to the port’s controversial plans to infill Dartmouth Cove.
He said having cruise ships dock on the Dartmouth side of the harbour could make it harder to sell passengers trips to tour destinations to the south of Halifax because about 80 per cent of passengers prefer shorter, half-day tours that still leave them time to explore the city. But it will also make feasible other destinations that take too long to reach through Halifax traffic when ships dock at the port’s downtown berths, most particularly the Annapolis Valley. And using Halifax’s two toll bridges for the Ambassatours buses would keep the popular destination of Peggy’s Cove accessible within a reasonable timeframe.
Shannon Park also has the additional virtue of not yet being developed, Campbell added, making it easier for cruise lines to have a collaborative role in shaping how the community is built out, unlike Dartmouth Cove, which is already surrounded by a well-established mix of residential and light industrial development. (For example, the Centre for Ocean Ventures and Entrepreneurship, an ocean technology hub where companies regularly test unmanned submersibles and other marine vehicles, is located in a former Coast Guard base adjacent to Dartmouth Cove.)
Dennis Campbell has six Harbour Hoppers in his Halifax fleet.
The 3,000-housing-unit project is slated for the site of a former military housing complex and will eventually add 23 new city blocks to Dartmouth, with construction not expected to begin in earnest until next fall, according to reporting by the CBC.
“Even though you’d have to go under the Macdonald Bridge, when you look at the size of the container ships that can go under the bridge, it wouldn’t limit many of the cruise ships,” said Campbell. “I’d say 90-plus per cent of the ships in the world could still go through.”
The Harbour Hoppers are popular with locals and tourists alike, as these Vietnam-built machines play Halifax Harbour and ride on city streets (Ambassatour photo).
Meanwhile, Ambassatours’ inclusion as a business awards finalist is in large part thanks to the work of marketing manager Giacomo Bruno, who Campbell describes as an impressive talent with a penchant for embracing modern technologies like drone cameras.
“We had a lot of fun with that submission,” says Campbell. “And we had a lot of fun with the video production that the Chamber of Commerce has put together. No one will see that until the awards night … We’re just thrilled to be a finalist.”
He adds that Ambassatours, which broadly relies on employing students during the summer months, and mature, semi-retired tour guides during the shoulder seasons, has grown beyond his expectations when he founded the company in 1994. These days, in fact, he employs several hundred people during peak travel season.
“I wish I could tell you I did envision it to be what it is,” he says. “As large as it is, I really didn’t. I’ve been pleasantly surprised, just in how its evolved over the years and grown. And I’ve got to say, it’s never been simple or easy, but it does boil down to, the real key to success is surrounding yourself with good people.
“When you realize your own weaknesses, and you get people that do what you should be able to do, but they do it much better, that creates some magic.”
The Harbour Hoppers are a familiar site on downtown Halifax streets, and they also sail Halifax Harbour. Originally built by the US for the Vietnam War.
With Ambassatours’ clientele numbers having recovered beyond pre-pandemic levels, Campbell is eyeing new expansion opportunities as the province continues to make progress on twinning Hwy. 103. The provincial government plans to twin the highway as far as Chester by the end of 2026, which will bring Lunenburg and Mahone Bay closer to being viable destinations for half-day tours. Campbell says he has advocated for even further extension of the highway.
“Once it’s twinned as far as Mahone Bay and Lunenburg, that’s going to be a total, total game changer,” he says. “As great as Peggy’s Cove is as an experience, Lunenburg and Mahone Bay have so much to offer.
Dennis Campbell says tours of George’s Island are very popular last summer. The island is in Halifax Harbour.
“And that will ease the pressure on Peggy’s Cove. They’ll always, always be very popular. They’ll never have to worry about that. But this will ease the stress on Peggy’s Cove and it will be a bigger economic generator, spreading that economic spend further down the South Shore.”
