ICCA ponders MICE tourism recovery

07-08-22

The International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) is releasing new information to shed more light on how the pandemic affected the association meetings industry in 2021. The public summary of ICCA's annual statistics report is now available to non-ICCA members after a one year. year hiatus.

Due to the transformative events of 2020, ICCA refined its reporting approach by including meetings that were affected by the pandemic as well as those that were not. Now, non-ICCA members can also benefit from this new methodology, called the Destination Performance Index (DPI), which provides a more holistic view of how destinations have addressed recent challenges.

In addition, Public Abstract presents the top destinations for association meetings in 2021, based on the estimated total number of attendees for hybrid and virtual events. It also provides a three-year economic impact analysis, which is generally not available to non-ICCA members.

The DPI examines 8,000 international association meetings scheduled for 2021 against six performance indicators (planned, unaffected, virtual, hybrid, digitisation and business continuation). When combined, the indicators represent the overall IPD, highlighting the performance of destinations with respect to winning the original bid, COVID policies, adaptability and technological capabilities to convert face-to-face events to virtual/hybrid events.

The countries and cities represented in the top 20 meetings destinations in 2021 are similar to the 2019 report, with a few exceptions. As in 2019, the US is the best performing country for association meetings in the DPI, ranking first in four of the six indicators (planned, virtual, digitisation and business continuation). The remaining two indicators, unaffected and hybrid, were led by Spain and China-P.R., respectively. Vienna and Lisbon were close contenders in the DPI for cities, but Vienna ultimately claimed the lead because it had more unaffected meetings in 2021.

Overall, Europe performed solidly as an association meeting destination during the pandemic. Seventy percent of the top 20 countries and 80% of the top 20 cities are European. Denmark and Greece replaced Argentina and Brazil in the top 20 meeting countries. Austria made the biggest jump, from 16th to 11th. Italy reclaimed fifth place from the UK. Spain jumped two places from 2019 to become the second largest meetings destination globally.

Facing stricter COVID policies than many other meetings destinations worldwide, China P.R, Japan and the Republic of Korea adopted new technologies to go hybrid. In fact, due to its large number of hybrid meetings, the Republic of Korea replaced the Netherlands among the top 10 country destinations.

Among destination cities, Montreal (19) and Dubai (21) were outliers within their respective regions. Montreal was the only North American city in the top 20. Dubai ranked first in unaffected meetings and was the only Middle Eastern city represented in all six individual rankings of the top 20. Meanwhile, Budapest, Porto and Stockholm are all newcomers to the top 20 DPI for cities.

ICCA's full annual statistics report, available only to ICCA members, contains additional analysis on top destinations, economic impact, regional/global business continuity and meetings themes.