In nearly a decade at the helm of Rogers Centre Ottawa, Nina Kressler has steered the downtown meeting and convention centre through some of the rockiest waters the hospitality industry has ever faced. When COVID-19 all but shut the sector down, Kressler kept the building afloat. The 35-year convention industry veteran helped the facility previously […]
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In nearly a decade at the helm of Rogers Centre Ottawa, Nina Kressler has steered the downtown meeting and convention centre through some of the rockiest waters the hospitality industry has ever faced.
When COVID-19 all but shut the sector down, Kressler kept the building afloat. The 35-year convention industry veteran helped the facility previously known as the Shaw Centre get back on its feet, tapping into new international markets and diversifying its customer base.
The building also earned global acclaim under Kressler’s leadership when it received the 2020 AIPC Apex Award as the world’s best convention centre from the sector’s main industry group.
Last month, Kressler announced she will step down as president and CEO of Rogers Centre Ottawa in June 2025 – 10 years to the month after she took the job with the goal of making the facility the No. 1 convention venue in Canada.
It hasn’t always been easy, but Kressler is proud of what she and her staff have accomplished. In an interview with OBJ reporter David Sali on Tuesday morning, Kressler discussed her tenure as CEO and why the time is right for her to pass the torch.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
DS: What led to your decision to leave your current role?  Â
NK: I love this job immensely – it’s been the honour of my career. But I have an aging parent outside of Halifax who needs my attention. She was always there for me when I was advancing my career … so I just feel it’s time for me to give back to her as well. My mom is 95, so it’s precious time at this point. She’s still living in her home, so I want to be there, and I need a role that will allow me to work a bit more remotely between Halifax and Ottawa. We do love Ottawa and plan on staying here, but I just need that type of flexibility. Family first, as they say.
DS: You’ve been through some ups and downs in this job. What are some of the challenges that stand out?
NK: One of the biggest things that stood out for me as a challenge was the shootings in Parliament (on Oct. 22, 2014, when Kressler was general manager of food and facilities). We had a full house of customers here. The media was reporting at the time that there were multiple shooters and they might be in the Rideau Centre. So bringing us into a fast lockdown and ensuring safety and security was (the) utmost (priority) for our customers and our employees. It’s not one I’d want to do over, but you learn a lot by coming through something like that. Out of that, we (developed) a much more enhanced security plan. We are in the nation’s capital and we are in different times today. Security is an area in all of our business now that will take a new focus as we move forward with a lot of the challenges happening globally today.
DS: What about the biggest highlight of your career in Ottawa?
NK: Taking us to becoming the best convention centre in the world is definitely the honour of my career and all of our staff here. It was such an honour to be bestowed with that, because it’s tough criteria. It really put Ottawa on the map. A lot of customers, when you talk to them around the world, Ottawa may not be the first place to come to mind for them – it might be more Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal. So I think that helped us position ourselves on the global stage as a place that you’d want to bring your event to or you could do some serious business here in this city.
DS: What were the biggest lessons you learned from the pandemic?
NK: There was nothing worse than having to deliver layoff notices via Zoom. We took layoffs at all levels of the organization, and I made sure I was involved in all of those calls. It was important that it came from me, and that it was understood that we would be back and would get back on track. I’m so happy to say that we had many (employees) that obviously had to find work elsewhere, but they’ve come back because they wanted to come back to this industry, even though it was volatile and will continue to be volatile. If it’s not COVID, it’ll be something else. What I learned from it really was you need compassion. You can’t hide in the corner office. You need to be communicating directly with your team and you need to be honest with them. If you don’t know what the next year’s going to look like, tell them that.
DS: What’s your assessment of the state of the hospitality industry right now?
NK: It’s coming back. I would say we’re at maybe 90, 95 per cent of 2019 (levels). But the business that we’re bringing back is really interesting, new business that we have spent many years chasing, and that’s our international markets. The U.K. is an example. We’ve been extremely successful (there). Our summer business is now filled by the international markets, which traditionally haven’t been busy (in Ottawa). It’s filling our need periods right across the ecosystem of tourism in July and August. We didn’t take our foot off that pedal. Everybody was competing for that business when we came out of COVID.
DS: How much of your convention business now comes from international customers?
NK: I would say around 20 per cent. But what I would say to that is (international visitors) stay longer, and when they’re coming from that distance, they attach some vacation time to it. While it’s a smaller piece of the pie, it’s very lucrative because of the time of the year that they come and the seasonality that they fill.
DS: What’s the outlook for the industry for the next few years?
NK: Our conventional business has grown. 2022-23 was our busiest year – much of that was things that were pushed out from the pandemic. But the momentum continues. We’re delighted with what our pace looks like for the future. Meeting planners arne’t signing contracts five, six years out anymore. I understand that. They’re mitigating any risk since the pandemic. The challenge, though, is the dates that they then want aren’t available. The booking window is so short now. So we work in tandem with (customers) to come up with ways that we can write contracts that benefit both organizations. We’ll also work with those customers if we have an opportunity to do multi-year business with them – tie in some incentives to have them look further out. Maybe it’s a three-year program, and if you want to secure your three-year dates, we’ll work with you on that.
DS: When you took the job, you said you wanted the building to become Canada’s No. 1 convention centre. Where have you made the biggest strides in getting to that point?
NK: We made the biggest strides probably in the smallest of ways. Whenever you go into a large meeting space, the rooms are cooler. The meeting planner usually asks us, ‘Make sure that you have the temperatures cool in there. We want people to be awake.’ What we find is a lot of our female attendees will say, ‘Please turn up the heat in here.’ So we ordered these beautiful pashmina (shawls) in the corporate colours that staff were empowered to give out to anybody who asked us to turn the heat up … which they could keep. They looked really nice, they provided a great purpose, and it was a touch point for our staff to immediately try to rectify a negative situation. Another thing is a lot of event planners are women, and at the end of the night they’d be walking in their stockings because their feet were just so sore. So we designed these ballet flats that staff also gave out to them. The other thing is a lot of people forget their reading glasses. So we’ve got reading glasses in every strength you could possibly think of. So there’s a lot of little things like that – it’s anticipating your needs, I guess. The other things are the red adirondack chairs. I always saw people sitting on the floor eating, and we don’t want that. Since then, the airport has them, the NAC has them. You see these chairs popping up everywhere. Sometimes it is the simplest things that can make people happy.
DS: Is there any area where you’d say you haven’t quite hit the mark?
NK: Some of the hardest things fall under security. We are such an accessible building. Security is an area that we’re closely looking at now because we live in times of protests, of global unrest. We want to ensure that our staff and our delegates in the building feel safe. We are working on perfecting that, so I would say that’s still a work in progress for us. It’s that balancing act between (providing) hospitality and keeping people as safe and secure as possible.Â
DS: What’s next for you professionally?
NK: I still have gas in the tank. I’m not ready to hang it up. I’m sure there are positive things ahead. What they’ll be, I don’t know. But (family is) priority for me right now.
