Ottawa's tourism industry — finally! — sees signs of recovery in 2023
Peter Hum, Ottawa Citizen
Published May 26, 2023
Tour buses are filling up and the 2023 Tulip Festival drew an impressive half-million visitors. Local businesses have good reason to feel optimistic again.
OTTAWA - May 10, 2023 - Stefanie Siska, Co-Owner & General Manager of C'est Bon Ottawa, a culinary tourism and cooking class company Assignment 139037 Photo by Jean Levac/Ottawa Citizen PHOTO BY JEAN LEVAC /Postmedia
If you want to know how Ottawa’s tourism sector is doing, look no further than the meeting point outside the Ottawa School of Art in the ByWard Market. Next to the towering totem pole on George Street, tour groups congregate as their buses line up.
Not only are there more tour buses, but they are carrying with them more tourists, says Stefanie Siska, co-owner of C’est Bon Cooking, a Dalhousie business that conducts culinary walking tours in the ByWard Market.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Siska herself ushered 10 Dutch tourists, who themselves were tour operators, on a food-filled walk through the ByWard Market. Over two and a half hours, the visitors stopped at a half-dozen of C’est Bon’s 30-odd partners in the Market for samples and stories.
After curds and Oka cheese at International Cheese, a chicken tikka wrap at Shafali Bazaar, a duck prosciutto salad at Clarendon Tavern, and a mustard tasting at Canada in a Basket, the inevitable finish was a BeaverTail at the inaugural stand on George Street.
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Ottawa's tourism industry — finally! — sees signs of recovery in 2023
Tour buses are filling up and the 2023 Tulip Festival drew an impressive half-million visitors. Local businesses have good reason to feel optimistic again.
Author of the article
eter Hum
Published May 26, 2023 • Last updated May 27, 2023 • 8 minute read
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Stefanie Siska of C'est Bon Ottawa, leads a culinary tour
OTTAWA - May 10, 2023 - Stefanie Siska, Co-Owner & General Manager of C'est Bon Ottawa, a culinary tourism and cooking class company Assignment 139037 Photo by Jean Levac/Ottawa Citizen PHOTO BY JEAN LEVAC /Postmedia
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If you want to know how Ottawa’s tourism sector is doing, look no further than the meeting point outside the Ottawa School of Art in the ByWard Market. Next to the towering totem pole on George Street, tour groups congregate as their buses line up.
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Not only are there more tour buses, but they are carrying with them more tourists, says Stefanie Siska, co-owner of C’est Bon Cooking, a Dalhousie business that conducts culinary walking tours in the ByWard Market.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Siska herself ushered 10 Dutch tourists, who themselves were tour operators, on a food-filled walk through the ByWard Market. Over two and a half hours, the visitors stopped at a half-dozen of C’est Bon’s 30-odd partners in the Market for samples and stories.
After curds and Oka cheese at International Cheese, a chicken tikka wrap at Shafali Bazaar, a duck prosciutto salad at Clarendon Tavern, and a mustard tasting at Canada in a Basket, the inevitable finish was a BeaverTail at the inaugural stand on George Street.
Ottawa Tourism chief executive officer Michael Crockatt. PHOTO BY JEAN LEVAC /Postmedia
Jo Riding, executive director of the Canadian Tulip Festival, is excited that her event, which ran from May 12 to 22, drew a half-million visitors, including 250,000 people during its opening weekend alone.
Because the event this year used new technology to measure attendance, it’s hard for Riding to compare the turnout in 2023 to rough estimates made in past years. She feels that this year’s crowds matched last year’s record turnout, and that the 2023 crowds would have been larger had there not been “a drastic dip in the temperature” during the festival.
This year, the festival drew larger night-time crowds due to special programming as well as sound and light shows at Commissioners Park, Riding says. And the shuttles to Dow’s Lake from downtown hotels had to upsize to double-deckers, she says.
Meanwhile, the public mood regarding the pandemic has shifted from last year to this year, she adds. Visitors are more carefree.
“You can feel the difference, the increased level of comfort (regarding COVID-19),” Riding says. “People are chatting more. They’re smiling more… Less fear, less worries, longer stays, later visits. It’s really palpable.”
While the pandemic may have erased our memories of tourists flocking to the nation’s capital, Crockatt says that 2017—the year Ottawa hosted the event-filled Canada 150 bonanza—set Ottawa on a path toward greater tourism-related prosperity.
Six years ago, Ottawa hosted the Juno Awards, the Grey Cup, and the NHL 100 Classic outdoor hockey game. There was an Interprovincial Picnic on the Bridge on July 2 and Canada’s Table, a late-August gourmet dinner party on Wellington Street.
That year, the Ottawa Welcomes the World series at Lansdowne Park attracted more than 230,000 guests. More than 325,000 people made their way underground to the future Lyon Station of the LRT for the multimedia show Kontinuum. Most impressively, 750,000 people took in the La Machine exhibition over four days in July.
Also in 2017, the Shaw Centre welcomed almost double the number of conventions and delegates compared with previous years, as organizations and associations brought their gatherings to Ottawa in celebration of Canada’s 150th anniversary.
After such an exceptional year, the expectation was that Ottawa would see a drop-off in tourism numbers and revenue. But then 2018 matched 2017, Crockatt says. And 2019 surpassed them both, setting a new benchmark.
The stereotyped criticisms about Ottawa being a boring government town dissipated, he says, especially for younger tourists. Ottawa Tourism was expecting even more growth in 2020.
Instead, COVID-19 devastated the tourism and hospitality industry, Ottawa’s second-largest private-sector employer after the tech sector.
Even after lockdowns and capacity limits fell by the wayside, the indirect effects of the pandemic continued to challenge Ottawa’s tourism industry.
The hollowing out of downtown, as many workers stayed in their home offices, hurt tourism.
For example, the absence of downtown workers led to many restaurants cutting back their hours of operation, closing early in the week or foregoing lunch service. The result was fewer dining options for tourists, who told friends back home, says Crockatt. “The stories they tell, those impact our brand.”
Remote work also means fewer business travelers come to Ottawa. Videoconferencing replaced in-person meetings, so lobbyists and consultants had less reason to travel to Ottawa.
While tourism businesses had hoped for a big rebound last year, the pandemonium and illegal occupation in Ottawa’s downtown discouraged tourists from visiting in February 2022. For weeks after, there were negative feelings about wanting to visit Ottawa, according to Ottawa Tourism’s measures of Canadian’s sentiment.
“We were dead last in almost every metric,” says Crockatt. “Anyone booking future travel in Ottawa wasn’t going to come here. They were going to book somewhere else.”
Meanwhile, the ongoing inflation that affects the economies in Canada and abroad is a tricky matter to figure into consideration of the tourism industry. Crockatt says inflation may well de-stimulate travel due to rising costs. But for those who do travel to Ottawa, spending will be higher.
Before the pandemic, visitors spent $2.2 billion each year in Ottawa.
And it’s been well-known since the end of lockdowns and the return of in-person dining that finding staff has been a major hurdle for tourism and hospitality businesses.
C’est Bon employs specialized chefs for cooking classes and tour guides, and Siska says staffing was “a rollercoaster” during the pandemic.
“We couldn’t give anybody a promise of work, not knowing if we would be at capacity,” Siska says. “It was hard to try to staff somebody if we didn’t know if the income was going to be there.”
But in the past six months, Siska says it’s been easier to hire people. “The interest (in working) has come back.”
Nonetheless, the hospitality industry faces an enduring and daunting challenge with respect to staffing, says Altaf Sovani, the former academic chair of Algonquin College’s school of hospitality and tourism.
Last fall, Sovani published his book Labor Crisis In Hospitality, Tourism & Event Industry: Finding Innovative Solutions for Recruitment and Retention of Millennials. Its thesis was that even before the pandemic, hospitality workers were seeing their job satisfaction decline, and that after COVID-19 struck, it prompted an exodus that will only be fully addressed with systemic issues in the industry are addressed.
“This is not going to go away very soon,” Sovani says. “It’s going to stay here for a while, before we get to whatever the norm is.”
In the capital region’s hotel industry, for example, roughly 20 per cent of the workforce is missing, says Steve Ball, president of the Ottawa-Gatineau Hotel Association. Between his 63 members, there were 565 jobs, ranging from room attendants to senior positions, that needed filling in February.
“There’s not a quick fix,” he says. To cope with short-staffing, hotels are making more use of technology and changing how they provide services to guests.
Millennials want careers that provide benefits and a better work-life balance in the industry, Sovani says. He adds that the tourism and hospitality industries, academia and government will have to row in the same direction to address labour shortages.
Still, the industry in Ottawa does have developments to cheer about in 2023.
Many hope that the June 27 launch of Air France’s direct, five-days-a-week flights between Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport and Ottawa will be a boon to tourism in the capital.
“We are already marketing the heck out of it,” says Crockatt, who recently sent staff to Paris to woo tour operators and travel media.
Air France’s inclusion of Ottawa in its extensive network comes after the rollback in recent years of Air Canada’s direct flights connecting Ottawa and London.
And before the end of this year, the Montreal-based high-end hotel group RIMAP Hospitality will open its first hotel in Ottawa— the 24-storey, 159-room AC Hotel Marriott on Rideau Street.
RIMAP is placing a half-billion-dollar vote of confidence in Ottawa. Two more hotels are to follow the AC, says Stéphane Pelletier, RIMAP’s regional general manager for Ottawa.
RIMAP Hospitality’s Stephane Pelletier stands in front of the first of three hotels under construction that his Montreal-based hotel company is opening around Rideau Street in downtown Ottawa soon. PHOTO BY JULIE OLIVER /Postmedia
RIMAP plans to open the Moxy by Marriott Byward Market in 2025 and the Renaissance Ottawa Downtown in 2026. Between them, the three hotels will add 604 rooms to Ottawa’s stock of hotel rooms, which now numbers about 11,000.
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“The travel industry is rebounding rapidly, and the economy is returning to normal growth,” Pelletier says. “We are convinced that Ottawa will continue to be a world-class destination with tourism travel expanding exponentially for years to come.”
That should come at long last as welcome news to Siska’s culinary company, which was one of many that had to hunker down, retrench and pivot over the past three years.
But at least Siska’s company is still in operation. Several other culinary tour companies that operated in Ottawa before the pandemic are no longer in business here.
At its peak, before 2020, C’est Bon offered hundreds of tours a month across Chinatown, Little Italy, Wellington Village, Hintonburg and the Glebe. Today, her company only conducts culinary walking tours in the ByWard Market.
And yet C’est Bon now finds its numbers are higher than they were pre-pandemic. “Even if we’re offering fewer tours than in 2019, the volume is still higher,” she says. “We’re having an increase in demand.”
Selected Summer 2023 Events in Ottawa
Ottawa Italian Festival: June 8-18
Ottawa Fringe Festival: June 15-25
Festival Franco-Ontarien: June 16-17
Summer Solstice Indigenous Festival: June 21-25|
Tim Hortons Ottawa Dragon Boat Festival: June 22-25
Escapade Music Festival: June 23-25
Ottawa Jazz Festival: June 23-30
Music and Beyond: July 4-16
RBC Ottawa Bluesfest: July 6-16
HOPE Volleyball SummerFest: July 15
Chamberfest: July 21 – Aug. 4
Les Grand Feux du Casino Lac Leamy: Aug. 2-19
Ottawa International Busker Fest: Aug. 4-7
The Chef’s Table: Aug. 10 – Sept. 9
Capital Pride: Aug. 19-27
Gatineau Hot Air Balloon Festival: Aug. 31 – Sept. 4
phum@postmedia.com
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/ottaw...covery-in-2023
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