Conference & Meetings World Issue 101 — July / August

ICCA rankings ICCA again emphasises that its annual report is a snapshot of just one segment of the meetings industry, focused on charting the growth of international association meetings. Only those meetings that meet ICCA’s stringent assessment criteria - rotating between at least three countries, have a proven attendance of at least 50 participants, and are held on a regular basis - are recorded within the annual statistics. ICCA’s CEO Senthil Gopinath said: “Although the most comprehensive global benchmark of the international association meetings sector, the ICCA rankings should not be mistaken as providing an overview of the entire meetings industry. We always seek to encourage and advise ICCA members to consult other rankings and collect their own meetings statistics to help them provide a full picture of their performance.” “We have recorded our largest ever annual snapshot of the immediate past year’s meetings data in 2018,” Gopinath continued. “These results closely follow the release of our 55-year history of the international association meetings market in October 2018. “ICCA’s latest figures uphold the mature, robust growth pattern we identified in this report and provide more evidence of our firm belief that the association sector continues to be an unrivalled stimulator of global societal development and force for progress across the globe.” Rankings by participant numbers ICCA has also published 2018 city and country rankings by estimated total number of participants. These rankings are headed, respectively by Barcelona and the USA. These rankings are put together by calculating the estimated total number of participants by multiplying the average number of participants per meeting by the total number of meetings in the same destination. So, Barcelona hosts most delegates despite fewer number of meetings (49 fewer events than Paris, the number one city by number of meetings). One particular example that demonstrates how the number of participants presents a differing view of the market comes from Munich. In 2018, the city, which comes in at 35th place by number of meetings, jumps from 87th in 2017 to fourth place in 2018 by estimated total of participants – an impressive 93,444. This is due to the fact the city hosted two large medical conferences in 2018: the Congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) with 32,858 participants, and the Congress of the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) with 27,700 participants. ICCA’s research also reveals that Medical Science (16.9%), Technology (14.2%) and Science (13.5%) are the three most popular international association meeting topics, while September remains the most popular month for organising international association meetings. In another strong indication of healthy market growth, the average total expenditure at all international meetings in the ICCA Association Database increased by a promising 4% in 2018, from €10.6bn in 2017 to over €11bn in 2018. Association meetings are clearly facing new challenges and ICCA’s Gopinath, added: “Our industry is facing challenges from saturation, consolidation and new entrants, to erosion of traditional business models and fragmentation. There are also great opportunities, including market growth, disruptive innovation, digitisation, new players, less market barriers, new audiences and new scalable models. Alongside all these developments, the number of events is continuing to grow exponentially.” The public abstract of the 2018 ICCA Statistics Report is available for free download now on the ICCA website. Table 1: City ranking by estimated total Table 2: Country/Territory rankings by estimated number of participants in 2018 total number of participants in 2018 Rank City Meetings 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Barcelona Paris Vienna Munich Berlin Amsterdam Toronto, ON Copenhagen Madrid Singapore Lisbon Buenos Aires Seoul London Montreal Bangkok Dublin Tokyo Sydney Hong Kong 134,838 126,243 104,775 93,443 87,623 85,549 84,600 80,618 71,885 69,261 67,382 60,848 58,996 54,788 54,122 53,668 51,313 48,787 48,272 47,630 Rank Country/ Territory 2018 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 USA Spain Germany France Canada United Kingdom Italy Japan Netherlands China-P.R. Austria Australia Portugal Brazil Republic of Korea Argentina Denmark Sweden Switzerland Belgium 384,035 296,825 293,337 241,044 203,429 181,149 168,578 168,248 149,513 146,982 120,981 116,000 113,154 106,045 105,084 95,632 91,975 83,796 75,640 72,846 ISSUE 101 / International Congress and Convention Association 2018 ICCA Statistics Report Country & City Rankings Public Abstract Above: A public abstract of the 2018 ICCA Statistics Report is available from the association’s website. CONFERENCE & MEETINGS WORLD / 27

Conference & Meetings World Issue 101 — July / August | Page 27