THE world’s top five cities for meetings have held their ground in 2014’s ICCA ranking.
Paris remains champion with 214 meetings conducted in 2014. Vienna and Madrid traded places with a two-meeting difference between them – Vienna with 202 meetings and Madrid with 200. Likewise, Berlin came ahead of Barcelona this year with 193 meetings, while the latter scored 182 meetings.
Singapore was Asia’s highest-ranked city and came in seventh with 142 meetings, right behind London’s 166.
Beijing, Seoul and Hong Kong came in consecutively at 14, 15, and 16 for hosting 104 ,99 and 98 meetings respectively, while Taipei wrapped up the top 20 list with 92 events.
The same results were reflected in the international list where there was little change. The US (831 meetings), Germany (659) and Spain (578) remained top scorers in 2014, while the UK (543) and France (533) swapped into fourth and fifth place respectively.
From Asia-Pacific, Japan held seventh place for its 337 meetings and was followed by China with 332. South Korea hosted 222 meetings in 2014 and thus came in 17th place.
According to an ICCA press release, the association relooked its historical data over the last one year to weed out all meetings that did not meet its three-country rotation criterion as well as single meetings that appeared to be multiple, separate meetings before.
While this dampened growth levels, ICCA said it believes growth remains robust.
However, CEO Martin Sirk, commented: “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 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.”
