Seoul comes out tops for being the city to host the most international association meeting attendees in Asia, while Japan triumphs over China in country ranking.
The International Congress and Convention Association’s (ICCA) latest annual statistics report country and city rankings by number of meetings captured. 12,212 rotating international association meetings took place in 2016, which is a record for ICCA’s annual snapshot of immediate past year’s meetings data, and with 136 additional meetings compared to 2015. To be included, association meetings must be held on a regular basis, have at least 50 delegates, and rotate between at least three countries.
Seoul takes the top spot for cities in Asia with 104,780 meeting participants, way ahead of Beijing and Singapore, even though it ranks 10th in the number of meetings held in 2016 globally.
Among the top 10 global country rankings, Japan triumphs over China and South Korea with 205,537 participants for 410 meetings held.
This was another decade of great success for the sector as ICCA identifies more than double the number of association meetings in a decade: from just under 6,000 in 2006 to over 12,000 in 2016.
This means that the trend of exponential growth, as identified in ICCA’s advocacy report “A modern history of international association meetings: 1963-2013”, published at ICCA’s 50-year anniversary in 2013 (available on www.icca50.com), continues to apply: The number of association meetings continues to double every decade.
International association meetings are quickly growing in number, but are generally getting smaller. The estimated total number of participants to all meetings in ICCA’s Association Database was approximately four million in 2006 and five million in 2016, so while the total number of meetings grew with 100 percent in a decade, the total number of participants grew by 25 percent. The average number of participants to an international association meeting decreased from 672 in 2006 to 404 in 2016.
ICCA points out though that its statistics on international association meetings are often just a small segment of the total amount of international meetings taking place in a city or country, and urges its members to collect their own information on meetings hosted in their destination. By publishing these rankings by estimated total number of participants, ICCA hopes its members will look beyond the standard ICCA rankings.
ICCA CEO Martin Sirk commented: “We can’t stress this point strongly enough – ICCA’s rankings are a snapshot of a moment in time of a database designed for sales and marketing purposes, for a very specific segment of the market, a segment moreover where decisions are made three to six years in advance. Any destination wishing to accurately present its true performance in the international meetings field needs to complement the ICCA statistics and rankings with its own robust measurement of all meetings business won for the future and hosted in the past year. With our ICCA Destination Comparison Tool, ICCA members can also extract data on meetings that are especially important for their destination, for example if they’re primarily interested in meetings of more than 1,000 delegates, or which are related to a particularly important segment of the association market, such as medical sciences – we expect to see many ICCA members communicating their rankings in these specific type of meetings, and not just relying on their position in our overall rankings”.
ICCA assists the international association community to run more efficient and effective meetings. Associations can register for the ICCA Association Portal on www.associations.iccaworld.org, a unique online platform providing a safe environment through which Association Executives could get in touch with peers to exchange valuable advice and information on their meetings.
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