ECM Research Newsletter – Editorial

Dear colleagues,

Most countries and cities use statistics on bed nights and room nights to measure and benchmark tourism performance on a national and city level.

When it comes to benchmarking and measuring the meeting industry there are also other important sources, for example reports and rankings from the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) and the Union of International Associations (UIA) and from our own ECM network.

ICCA recently published its annual global rankings of countries’ and cities’ international meetings. All top five positions in the city ranking by number of meetings are held by European capital cities. Meetings are important and when Meetings Professional International (MPI) recently published its spring edition of Meetings Outlook 2015, they predicted intelligent growth for the meeting industry.

Within ECM we are just about to finalise the next edition of the ECM Meeting Statistics Report, which is free to join and read for all ECM members. The report provides insight into the meeting industry in European cities and alongside other research and forecasts it gives a broad perspective and understanding of the meeting industry.

The report includes information on both corporate and non-corporate meetings and presents its main findings for both segments in relation to:

  • National meetings
  • International meetings
  • Size of meetings
  • Duration/ length of stay
  • Number of delegates
  • Choice of venue

We hope you’ll join us to hear some of the preliminary results, which we will be presenting in the course of the ECM Annual Meeting.

As ever, I hope you will find the report and our other research projects very useful.

Camilla Ekberg
Project Manager, Malmö Tourism / Convention Bureau
Member of ECM’s Research & Statistics Group