The golf travel market has been booming, but is there any chance that the boom is a bubble? It seemed like an apt question for Ben Cowan-Dewar, co-founder and CEO of Cabot.
Since 2011, when he teamed up with Bandon Dunes founder Mike Keiser to open Cabot Links, in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Cowan-Dewar has helped transform the Cabot brand into a marquee name in destination golf, with a reach that stretches from Canada to the Caribbean, Scotland, France and beyond.
The job is a boyhood dream come true for Cowan-Dewar, 45, who spent countless idle hours as a kid doodling golf holes in his school notebooks and roughing out versions of his designs on his family’s farm in Ontario, Canada. In college, Cowan-Dewar launched a golf travel business and continued on that path after graduation — but always with an eye toward something more.
A watershed moment in his career came when Cowan-Dewar, still in his twenties, convinced Keiser to take a look at a promising seaside parcel in Nova Scotia, the site that would become Cabot Links.
For Cowan-Dewar, Keiser became both a business partner and a mentor whose principles still guide his work at Cabot. The company’s expanded portfolio now includes such A-list properties as Cabot St. Lucia in the Caribbean; Cabot Revelstoke in western Canada; Cabot Highlands in Scotland and Cabot Bordeaux in France, as well as a major investment in Lofoten Links, a remote-golf darling above the Arctic Circle in Norway.
In recent years, no golf developer has made more headlines.
The latest news from Cabot came just weeks ago, when Cowan-Dewar was in Brooksville, Fla., to mark the official grand opening of Cabot Citrus Farms. The company’s first destination in the United States, Citrus Farms represents a thorough overhaul of World Woods Golf Club, which has been transformed into a golf resort and real-estate community with two 18-hole courses, a pair of short courses, state-of-the-art practice facilities, two and-four-bedroom cottages and more.
On an unseasonably brisk morning, one day after the ribbon cutting, Cowan-Dewar sat for an interview with Destination Golf, a new golf and travel podcast on GOLF.com, to talk about his life in golf and travel, his goals for Citrus Farms and for Cabot as a whole, and why he believes the allure of the game is more powerful than any cycles of boom and bust. To hear the entire interview, click here here.
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