By Holly Nelson
Mild temperatures and wet conditions may have created havoc for last year’s Winterlude festival. This year local businesses are hopeful the cold weather and good canal conditions will bring more people to the city.
And organizers are taking a new approach this year to help attract more people to the festival, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary.
Guy LaFlamme, vice-president of the National Capital Commission, says the NCC has a more substantial advertising campaign this year and has entered into a sponsorship with Bell Globemedia. He says rather than the NCC increasing its advertising budget, it receives free ad space from its sponsors.
Bell Globemedia is giving the festival $1 million in free advertising in the form of print ads in the Globe and Mail and television coverage on the CTV network, according to LaFlamme.
Increased awareness of the festival will benefit some local businesses, especially food kiosks near Winterlude events.
“Winterlude brings a lot of hungry people,” says Pam Hooker, a co-founder of the BeaverTails chain.
Over the six to eight weeks that BeaverTails normally does business in the winter, Hooker estimates that over 50 per cent of her revenue is generated during Winterlude weekends.
She says winter sales last year were “abysmal” because the canal wasn’t open as long as in previous years.
LaFlamme says the poor weather turned people away.
“People were calling reservation services in local hotels and their first question was: Is the canal was open?
“Some people delayed or cancelled their plans,” he says.
Last February, hotel occupancy was down 16 per cent from the same period a year earlier, says Dick Brown, executive director of the Ottawa Hoteliers de l’Outaouais.
But LaFlamme is hopeful attendance will bounce back this year.
In 2000, a survey by Ekos Research Associates Inc. noted that over 1.6 million visits were made to Winterlude and that visitors and locals spent a total of $70 million, with $56 million spent in the National Capital Region alone.
“Winterlude brings in a lot of guests,” says Deneen Perrin, director of public relations for the Fairmont Chateau Laurier, which is an official Winterlude hotel.
“The three weekends in February are fairly booked although we do still have a few rooms left,” Perrin said.
To attract festival goers to the hotel, the hotels buy advertising space and create special Winterlude accommodation packages.
She says the hotel will also host a Winterlude press junket, in conjunction with the Ontario Ministry of Tourism and the Ottawa Tourism and Convention Authority, that will bring in travel journalists from the New York and Ontario.
Gerry LePage, executive director of the Bank Street BIA, says that while the festival injects millions of dollars to the region, he worries the event locations prevent areas like Bank Street from enjoying greater economic benefits.
“Over the years, the festivities have been geographically concentrated the Winterlude activities and confined the dollars to those areas,” LePage says.
He wants to see the re-instatement of a program called “Winterlude on the Fringe” that brought Winterlude fans to areas outside its current locations.
LePage says he feels this would allow other Ottawa merchants to have a more equitable share in the money the festival brings to the region.