Attendance down at 2025 QCX, organizers eye growth and improvements for 2026

Fewer people were going on rides, eating treats and meeting up with friends at the Queen City Ex this year in Regina.

Attendance was down quite a bit in 2025, as 74,655 fairgoers were scanned at the gates. That’s a drop of around 27 per cent from 2024, when attendance added up to 102,182.

Read more:

• Police responded to ‘relatively small number of incidents’ at 2025 Queen City Ex
• 18-year-old driver facing charges after 13-year-old passenger killed in Regina crash
• Artificial intelligence scams getting harder to detect, says expert

Rick Bennett, president and CEO of the Regina Exhibition Association Ltd., said several factors contributed to the lower attendance this year, including the Roughriders playing an away game on Saturday and the timing of the Saskatchewan Day holiday.

“The pause of several community activations like Kidway Morning, Newcomers Day, the 5k Midway Run, the pancake breakfast with free admission and a delayed start to ticket sales” also contributed to the drop in attendance, Bennett explained.

While fewer people made their way through the gates this year, Cat Betker, the event manager for the exhibition, said revenue wasn’t massively impacted.

She said there were a couple of new partnerships this year that brought a lot of foot traffic through the exhibition’s gates, including the new Thrill Zone, which staged high-adrenaline performances from Kings Park Speedway and Sask Drift.

“It was absolutely phenomenal. It is such a great group of people here in the city. They put on some fantastic shows. We ran out of bleachers. We need to get more bleachers and give them more space next year, because it was so incredibly popular,” said Betker.

“It was such a great opportunity for them to highlight what they do, promote what they do, and just cement their position within the community as well.”

This year also marked the debut of West Coast Amusements as the exhibition’s midway partner.

“Right now, we’ve got a five-year term contract with them, and then after five years we will kind of do some renegotiating and look at getting a new contract with them,” explained Betker.

Betker said the exhibition’s all-Canadian lineup of performing artists was also a success.

“The general response was really great. We’ve heard from a lot of folks that they appreciated that we were supporting the Canadian economy, keeping our money local and, especially, working with a company like West Coast Amusements, we’re really giving them an opportunity to shine and also grow and develop,” she said.

“It just feels really good to keep things Canadian rooted.”

One of the changes this year was the elimination of the pancake breakfast and the free admission partnership with the Regina Food Bank. Betker said it was because the exhibition was working with the new midway partner this year.

“We put a lot of those programs on hold just so that we can focus on delivering the best that we possibly can,” she said.

“If we’re going to do something, we want to make sure we do it right, but we’ve got every intention of bringing those programs back.”

As planning begins for the 2026 Queen City Ex, Betker said organizers will sit down with West Coast Amusements to discuss programs they can build into next year’s event. She said there are already plenty of ideas in the works to make the event even better next year.

“There are always lots of little things,” Betker explained.

“You plan the best that you can, but once you get on the ground and start walking around, you notice little things here and there, so we’ve got a long list of things already.”

Betker said organizers will be going through an in-depth process to determine where improvements can be made, which will include a survey with the internal teams and another survey that is open to the public.

“Those will be open for a couple of weeks,” she said. “We’ll gather all the responses, and then it’s probably a good month of just review and analysis and finding those little things that we can take away and work on.”

–with files from 980 CJME’s Jacob Bamhour