The welcome return of the ICCA Country – and City – Rankings for 2022

ICCA is pleased to announce the return of our annual ICCA Country – and City – Rankings for the year 2022, after an absence of two years. The publication of the rankings coincides with the World Health Organization’s recent declaration that Covid-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency, thereby emphasising the return to normalcy for the association meetings industry.

At the end of 2022, ICCA made the proactive decision to revert to normal rankings again, based on the observation that approximately 85 per cent of all meetings were held in-person. However, we do recognise that certain countries and territories were still working within the confines of Covid-19 restrictions.

In a joint effort with our dedicated members, ICCA’s Research team identified over 10,500 meetings of which some 9,000 meetings were held in-person, being either unaffected by Covid-19 or held in a hybrid format. As the association meetings industry is still catching up to the numbers of the last pre-pandemic year (13,254 meetings in 2019), we conducted a brief country and city comparative analysis, based on rankings rather than number of meetings. In addition, we will provide context to in-person versus planned meetings, showing how these statistics can be best utilised.

African Rankings

South Africa has once again ranked as the top African country for hosting 55 international association meetings in Africa, according to the 2022 International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) Rankings, coming in 41st place, followed by Morocco in 53rd place and Rwanda in 62nd place.

Cape Town, South Africa, has once again ranked as the top African city for hosting international association meetings in Africa, according to the 2022 International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) Rankings, with a total of thirty meetings taking place in the Mother City. Kigali, Rwanda, was the second most popular city, with a total of 21 meetings in Africa, followed by Cairo, Egypt for a total of seventeen meetings.

The rankings by International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) were based on the number of association meetings taking place regularly (annually and bi-annually), rotating between at least three different countries and with at least fifty participants.

Senthil Gopinath, chief executive officer of ICCA, said: “This is a tremendous undertaking by our team, one that is most welcomed by our members because the ICCA Country – and City – Rankings always generates huge industry interest. It’s heartening to see the drive towards in-person meetings is once more very strong and we predict this trend will grow throughout the coming year.”

ICCA strongly believes that statistics exist to tell a story, and therefore we offer our members various tools to do this in a comprehensive way. There is not a single country where at least one planned meeting was affected by the pandemic in 2022. The ICCA Database displays the status of each meeting, and in the relevant cases, shows the reasoning behind the organiser’s decision not to run a meeting as in-person.

ICCA released the results at IMEX23, recently held in Frankfurt.