More than 240,000 guests stayed overnight in accommodations in North Bay last year.
Tanya Bédard, Executive Director of Tourism North Bay, presented the tourism highlights for 2025 to council on Tuesday night.
She says visitors spent a lot of money in the city last year.
“Preliminary data for 2025 actually indicates that we account for 13% of that Northeastern Ontario spending, which is over $120 million in visitor spending in North Bay specifically,” she says.
Bédard adds that’s up 5.5% compared to the year before.
With visitor numbers, she says 90% are domestic, 7% are from the United States and 3% overseas.
Outdoor activities are once again a target priority for Tourism North Bay.
“We know based on consumer sentiment and some of the research that we’ve done is people are looking for outdoors,” says Bédard. “They want to get outside and they want to try something new.”
She says that doesn’t only mean fishing or power sports, it can include hikes on local trails, and more.
One outdoor event that returned last year was the Winter Market, which attracted about 8,000 people over four evenings in November.
“This was a two-year pilot, [and] it was incredibly successful,” says Bédard. “We’re now in the process of evaluating how to continue to offer this programming in 2026 and beyond,”
Other areas of focus include sports tourism, meetings and group events; history, arts & culture; and the growing culinary scene in North Bay.
