AFTER THE FIREWORKS
Ottawa hotels are really busy on Canada Day weekend every year. Just one week later, though, falling visitor numbers force hotel operators to aggressively offer discounts.
It’s a perennial pattern in the National Capital Region. Tourists scramble to find hotel rooms on Canada Day and are willing in most cases to pay full price. The following weekend? Not so much.
During last year’s Canada Day weekend, for instance, tourists secured 14,585 rooms across Ottawa. The next weekend, just 11,801 rooms were occupied, a decline of nearly 20 per cent according to a compilation by Ottawa Tourism.
Of course, that was the Canada 150 celebration, which pulled in an unusually high number of tourists. The year before, 13,448 rooms were booked on Canada Day weekend. That tally slipped about eight per cent to 12,407 the following weekend.
Data isn’t yet available for 2018, but the pattern is expected to be similar. Hotels contacted by this newspaper reported full occupancy over the Canada Day weekend despite the negative publicity associated with the 2017 celebrations, marred by heavy rains and extraordinary lineups to gain entrance to Parliament Hill.
Extreme heat on Canada Day may have kept a lot of people from the Hill this year, but visitors to Ottawa simply adapted. Guests at Kanata’s Brookstreet Resort spent July 1 in the pool overlooking the Marshes golf course. Those who wanted to celebrate the national holiday without encountering huge crowds attended a nearby Canada Day party hosted by Kanata. Last year, according to a hotel manager, resort guests made the trek en masse to Parliament Hill.
The number of rooms occupied this past weekend and Canada Day weekend don’t tell the full story. Jean Pierre Dupre, general manager of Alt Hotel Ottawa on Slater Street, learned the hard way last year that most hotels drop their rates significantly after Canada Day to keep their establishments as busy as possible. The 148-room Alt Hotel, which opened just two years ago in Ottawa, had been using a strategy of applying consistent room rates.
“We discovered all our competitors were dropping their rates after Canada Day,” Dupre said. The result: Alt Hotel lost some business last year and Dupre vowed it wouldn’t happen again in 2018.
So … down went the rates. Dupre declined to be specific, but a compendium compiled by Trivago last Friday noted that Alt Hotel rooms normally available for $217 were available for $177, a discount of 18 per cent.
That was enough to keep at least 60 per cent of Alt Hotel’s rooms full this past weekend, compared to 100 per cent on the Canada Day weekend.
Indeed, there were plenty of bargains on offer. Within the city core, rooms at the Lord Elgin, Fairmont Château Laurier, Westin, Delta and Sheraton were available this past weekend for between 23 per cent and 30 per cent off.
Outside the core, the Brookstreet Resort reported full occupancy both weekends, but — like its hotel rivals throughout the city — had to offer significant discounts on the weekend following Canada Day to achieve this.
Keeping hotels fully booked in Ottawa is difficult during the summer months despite festivals such as Bluesfest and the presence of so many national museums and galleries.
The reason is that the bulk of business and government hotel bookings take place from September to June, usually when Parliament is sitting. That’s another advantage for Kanata hotels such as the Brookstreet, which relies on a tech industry that holds conferences and other meetings year round.
Except, of course, on Canada Day.