Collecting and improving MICE Statistics – Amsterdam

  What we collect:

\n

    \n

  • International corporate and non-corporate meetings

    • \n

  • Minimum 2 days

    • \n

  • At least 40 participants

    • \n

  • 1/3 of participants are foreigners

    • \n

\n

 

\n

 Type of data:

\n

    \n

  • Name of the meeting

    • \n

  • Name of the association or organisation

    • \n

  • Website

    • \n

  • Start date

    • \n

  • End date

    • \n

  • Location where the meeting takes place

    • \n

  • Number of participants

    • \n

  • Type of meeting: corporate or non-corporate

    • \n

  • Field of activity (we use the ICCA categories such as medical sciences, technology, economics, etc.

    • \n

  • Type of organiser (accommodation, association itself, event company or PCO)

    • \n

  • Name of the organiser

    • \n

  • Email address of the organiser

    • \n

\n

How we collect data:

\n

    \n

  • Workshops: we organise a series of workshops in our office to train the people who will send us data (hotels, universities, congress centres, etc.).

    • \n

  • Data collection sheet: Once a year, we send a data collection sheet (an excel document with standardised dropdown menus) to all of our partners and organisations we know could have interesting data.

    • \n

  • Data check: we have a number of standardised automatic checks of the data to spot the most obvious problems easily (we use SPSS Statistics and SPSS Modeller). Then, we browse through every single meeting to remove doubles, delete meetings which do not meet the criteria, complete data when the information is available (for example in the ICCA database). If there are problems with the quality of data provided by one location, we make contact with the location to fix the problems.

    • \n

  • Test of the results in panels: once the data is analysed, we discuss the key results with a panel of key players in the field to fine-tune the analysis.

    • \n

  • Lead database: we also use a database including all leads which went through the Amsterdam Congress Board to get the complete picture.

    • \n

  • Communication: in order to increase awareness of the importance of these statistics, we produce a nicely designed report full of infographics which we present during a yearly meeting with all partners involved in this field. We discuss the results and how we could improve the quality of the statistics and the attractiveness of the destination.

    • \n

\n

In total, we invest 300 hours per year in this project, which are financed both by public and private partners.

\n

Olivier Ponti
Manager Research & Development, Amsterdam Tourist Board
Chairperson of the Research & Statistics Knowledge Group

\n