The Impact of The World Health Crisis on MICE COMPANIES

The International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) has released new information on how the pandemic impacted the association meetings industry in 2021. The Public Abstract of the ICCA Annual Statistics report is now available for non-ICCA members after a one-year hiatus. Due to the transformational events of 2020, ICCA refined its approach to the report by including meetings that were affected by the pandemic as well as those that remained unaffected. 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.

Additionally, the Public Abstract presents the top destinations for association meetings in 2021, based on estimated total number of attendees for hybrid and virtual events. It also provides a 3 year economic impact analysis, which is usually not available to non-ICCA members.

The DPI examines 8,000 international association meetings scheduled for 2021, based on 6 performance indicators (planned, unaffected, virtual, hybrid, digitalisation, and business continuation). When combined, the indicators represent the overall DPI, highlighting how destinations have performed with regard to winning the original bid, COVID policies, adaptability, and technological capabilities to convert on-site events into virtual/hybrid events.

The countries and cities represented in the top 20 meeting destinations in 2021 are similar to the 2019 report, with a few exceptions. As in 2019, the USA is the top performing country for association meetings in the DPI as they ranked 1st in 4 of the 6 indicators (planned, virtual, digitalisation, and business continuation). The remaining 2 indicators, unaffected and hybrid, were topped by Spain and China-P.R., respectively. Vienna and Lisbon were close in the DPI for cities but Vienna ultimately led due to having more unaffected meetings in 2021.

Overall, Europe was a strong performer as an association meeting destination during the pandemic. 70% 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 countries for meetings. Austria made the biggest jump, from 16th to 11th place. Italy claimed 5th place from the UK. Spain jumped 2 spots since 2019 to become the 2nd meeting destination globally.

With stricter COVID policies than many other global meeting destinations, China P.R, Japan, and the Republic of Korea were forced to go hybrid. In fact, due to their high number of hybrid meetings, the Republic of Korea replaced the Netherlands in the top 10 country destinations.

Amongst destination cities, Montreal (19th) and Dubai (21st) were both outliers within their respective regions. Montreal was the only North American city in the top 20. Dubai ranked 1st for unaffected meetings and was the only Middle Eastern city represented in the 6 individual top 20 rankings. Meanwhile, Budapest, Porto, and Stockholm are all newcomers to the top 20 DPI for cities.

The full report ICCA Annual Statistics report, available only to ICCA members, contains additional analysis on the top destinations, economic impact, regional/global business-continuation and meeting subject matters.

The entire chain involved in the MICE sector has suffered greatly due to the epidemic; events being postponed and then cancelled or cancelled altogether. As we recover, the situation is still not totally positive with staff shortages, supplier logistics, product delays, needing to source new suppliers as old ones went bust, the list is long! But how to solve these problems is at the forefront of people’s minds and it’s giving us a chance to change and do things differently and hopefully more economically and sustainably.