Conference & Meetings World Supplements - ISSUE 80 | Page 3

ICCA Ranking Meetings market movers might previously have appeared as multiple separate meetings. As a result, the normal levels of growth appear to be slightly reduced, even though ICCA believes the underlying rate of growth is still robust. ICCA CEO Martin Sirk said: “What was striking in this year’s exercise is the very large number of meetings we identified over the last 12 months for the year 2013 – more than 600 meetings were identified worldwide, 659 543 533 337 332 307 291 287 Germany Spain United Kingdom France Italy Japan China - P.R. Netherlands Brazil Austria 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 190 187 Belgium 222 Korea Turkey 226 Switzerland 191 229 Portugal 15 16 17 Argentina 238 260 Australia Sweden 265 Canada The USA continues to lead the way statistically in terms of number of qualifying meetings held in each country. Germany and Spain rank two and three, while UK and France swap places into fourth and fifth place respectively. 452 1 and we’re pretty certain we’ll have equal success in finding more qualifying 2014 meetings over the next 12 months. Most commentators are naturally focusing on the new 2014 rankings, but the nature of this business means that we always continue to identify many qualifying meetings long after each annual announcement. “We can’t stress this point strongly enough: ICCA’s rankings are a Country rankings: No change in the top five 578 U.S.A 831 A s this year's ICCA city and country rankings were released in June, The International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) explained it had undertaken a major review of historical data over the last 12 months, removing all meetings from its statistics which no longer met the strict three-country rotation criterion and clamping down on single meetings which 18 19 20 Number of meetings in the top 20 countries in 2015 CONFERENCE & MEETINGS WORLD 3