Spending · where the money goes
Montreal’s visitors spent $5.8 billion in 2025, flat against 2024 — but the composition is the healthiest in the series: food and accommodation take nearly three-quarters of every tourism dollar, the Palais des congrès generated CAD 238 million in spinoffs from 306 events in its last full count, and the 2026 summer ran 82% occupancy with bookings up 12%.
Montreal’s spending profile is the inverse of a shopping-destination model: visitors spend where the city is strongest — restaurants, hotels, festivals. Food and accommodation absorbed nearly 75% of the $5.8 billion in 2025, which is why the city’s tourism economy weathered the US downturn better than retail-heavy peers: the spend is experiential, not transactional, and it did not travel home with the visitors.
The convention engine sits underneath. The Palais des congrès’ last full count (2024) shows the scale: 306 business events, 874,000 delegates and CAD 238 million in spinoffs. In summer 2025 alone, seven US-based conferences generated CAD 50.7 million and 30,000 room nights — up from one US conference the previous summer — and the won-bid pipeline stretches to the 2028 World Conference on Earthquake Engineering.
The 2026 event stack turned directly into rate: hotel bookings rose 12% with 82% occupancy May–July, the Jazz Festival posted its largest attendance ever, and the August read had US visitation back above 2025. The UCI Road World Championships in September — ten competition days across the metropolitan region — is the single largest event bet since 1976, and its September hotel print will be the cleanest measure of event pricing power in the country this year.
The TIO framing: watch the convention calendar and the September ADR. Montreal’s $5.8 billion is stable because it is structurally diversified — three-quarters of it lands in hotels and restaurants that are locally owned and locally staffed. The upside case is event-led: every won bid and every race day converts directly into room nights in a market that just added 4% supply.
The TIO Read: Montreal monetizes culture the way Vancouver monetizes scarcity — deliberately. The $5.8 billion is flat but antifragile: 75 cents of every dollar lands in local restaurants and hotels, so the money stays in the city. The growth lever is the convention calendar, which is quietly the best in Canada — 306 events, 874,000 delegates, and a US-bid pipeline that tripled in one summer. Watch September: the UCI Worlds will print the country’s strongest event-rate week of 2026, and the city that just absorbed 4% more rooms will need every one of them.
Subscribe to the digest and receive key market signals every two weeks.