Barcelona claims first place in 2017’s ICCA city rankings; little change for Asian top performers

For the first time since 2004, Barcelona has claimed first place in the ICCA city rankings by number of meetings in 2017, knocking last year’s chart leader Paris down to second place.

Asian cities Singapore and Seoul remain at sixth and 10^th position.

Notable risers are Buenos Aires, jumping from 17^th to 11^th place, Budapest, jumping from 16^th to 12^th, and Hong Kong, jumping from 19^th to 13^th. Rome remains in 20^th place for another year. Newcomers to the top 20 in 2017 are Tokyo and Montreal.

Since 2016 there has not been much change in the top 10 country rankings, apart from a minor shift in positioning.

As it has done for the past two decades, the US holds firmly to the top spot with 941 meetings in 2017, seven more than the year before.

Asian countries on the top 10 chart include China, which has dropped from seventh spot to eighth while and Japan retains seventh place for a second year running.

ICCA captured a record number of 12,558 rotating international association meetings taking place in 2017, with 346 additional meetings taking place compared to 2016. This is the highest annual figure that ICCA has ever recorded in its yearly analysis of the immediate past year’s meetings data.

ICCA’s CEO Martin Sirk said: “In a world of disruption and unpredictability, the continuing growth in international association meetings is a welcome anomaly, but is not that surprising. We are still in a period of revolutionary change in terms of scientific and technological advancements, which are transforming traditional association fields such as healthcare and trade.

“To make sense of the tsunami of new data and information, association communities need to meet. Not just at their traditional, well-established meetings, but in new gatherings specifically invented to serve new academic fields or to reach out to new audiences. These are the pressures that we believe will continue to boost the sector for many years to come.”

Full ICCA statistics reports are available now to members only via ICCA’s Destination Comparison Tool. The rankings for all countries and cities will be released to the public in mid-June.