With remote work and rising costs, business travel has been the slowest tourism market to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. But one local tourism expert said the city is seeing more conferences and corporate meetings in 2025 than it has in years.
“We’re absolutely still lagging below others, but we’re really close to pre-pandemic performance, and we’re well-positioned for sustainable growth,” Stephanie Seguin, vice-president of sales for Ottawa Tourism’s business and major events team, told OBJ on Friday. “We’re having a great year. 2025 has been great for business and major events, and 2026 is going to be even better.”
The pandemic affected all aspects of tourism, but the business side had the added challenge of a slow recovery, long after travel restrictions had been lifted.
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According to Seguin, the tourism industry, including the business and major events side, was further set back by a loss of talent during the pandemic.
“We lost a lot of people in the industry that had so much of the ability to provide the services and be truly responsible to support those clients,” she said. “They had to build back their teams and we had to be very responsive to make sure we weren’t losing opportunities. We had a window where we were back to business when we weren’t fully back to having resources.”
But now, things are looking up.
After several quiet years on the business tourism front, large-scale events that took years to organize are now coming to fruition, Seguin said.
“During the pandemic, we had a true opportunity to lay all of that groundwork, and now we’re starting to see the fruits of a lot of that labour,” she said. “A lot of my team’s efforts, you don’t see that come to life for many years. A lot of our conference work that started pre-pandemic is only just happening now. Now that we’re in ‘25, we’re looking at ‘27 and beyond.”
With business tourism in recovery, Seguin said her team is looking for ways to attract more corporate attention.
One thing Ottawa Tourism has done is partner with other local organizations to create a new program to help leaders bring business events like conferences and conventions to the city.
Think Ottawa, a collaboration with Invest Ottawa and the Rogers Centre Ottawa, connects industry, academic, government and non-profit leaders to a team of experts to learn how to showcase the city. The program provides support in bid preparation, funding and attendance strategies—all things that are needed to successfully win event contracts.
“We want to be able to connect these leaders to our team immediately, so that we can essentially start any of the groundwork to help bring more events to the destination,” she said. “This serves our leaders and our business community. They have a vested interest to put their own work on an international stage, by bringing these conferences here. This is an important piece to that.”
Another thing Seguin’s team is doing is looking overseas.
While many corporate clients travel to Ottawa from within Canada, Seguin said new flights to international destinations, like Paris and London, have given the organizations new cities to target.
“We’ve worked for a number of years building awareness in the U.K.—we’ve got a lot of opportunities there and London is an amazing destination,” she said. “The EU is emerging and we’ve begun to see some early signs of Belgium being a great player for us to spend some time in.”
South of the border, she said that Washington, D.C. and Chicago are two prominent partners. While trade tensions have led some Canadian travellers to avoid the U.S., Seguin said Ottawa Tourism continues to work with long-term partners to attract them to Ottawa.
Though Ottawa operates at a smaller scale compared to destination giants like Toronto or Vancouver, Seguin said the city’s status as Canada’s capital, and a hub for national and international associations, give it a built-in advantage as a destination for corporate events.
“We’re able to attract international association conferences and have a number of very important sectors that help us to outline, very clearly, why they should tap into the Ottawa ecosystem,” she said. “We’ve got a very educated population, amazing universities and the tech industry is certainly one we can boast about. They’re all very important elements to why event planners would want to bring an event here.”
While growth is the goal, Seguin said it won’t be without its challenges. While the city’s tourism infrastructure is robust, it’s limited in how many events it can hold at once.
“Unlike Toronto, we don’t have massive hotels, as well as convention centres, and nearby places like Mississauga and so on,” she said. “We have to be quite strategic in terms of how we’re positioning and layering these different city-wide events so that we can have a fulsome calendar of events.”
In 2024, Steve Ball, president of the Ottawa Gatineau Hotel Association (OGHA), told OBJ that the shift away from corporate travel has been largely due to hybrid or remote workplaces.
“Corporate travel is what’s taking the longest to recover because the city’s been built around supporting the federal government and the pandemic, in a very short period of time, really diminished our corporate travel business,” explained Ball. “People are no longer coming here to do business with the government in the same volume that they used to because of the work-from-home policies of the federal government.
“Everything’s being done on Zoom now. So what’s lagging in Ottawa is the corporate travel business,” he continued. “We’re still not quite back to our 2019 numbers, whereas other markets have recovered to their pre-pandemic numbers.”
Some companies have made strategic efforts to target business travellers in response.
WestJet, for example, upped its domestic seat capacity out of Ottawa for 2025, including increasing service from the capital to Calgary and Edmonton. The company said in a press release at the time that the move was part of a strategy to “optimize connectivity” between Ontario and Western Canada, especially for business travellers.
